by Sylvia Plath
With love,
Sylvia
TO Leonie Cohn
Monday 28 January 1963
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
January 28, 1963
Miss Leonie Cohn
Talks Department
THE BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Miss Cohn,
Here, as I promised, is the script for my talk on the landscape of childhood. I hope it is the proper size; do let me know* if you think it is all right.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 4 February 1963
TLS* (aerogramme), Indiana University
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dear mother,
Thanks so much for your letters. I got a sweet letter from Dotty & a lovely hood & mittens for Nick from Warren & Margaret. I just haven’t written anybody because I have been feeling a bit grim---the upheaval over, I am seeing the finality of it all, and being catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness & grim problems is no fun. I got a sweet letter from the Nortons* & an absolutely wonderful understanding one from Betty Aldrich. Marty Plumer is coming over at the end of March which should be cheering. Mrs. Prouty has sent another check & dear letter.* I have absolutely no desire ever to return to America. Not now, anyway. I have my beautiful country house, the car, and London is the one city of the world I’d like to live in---with its fine doctors, nice neighbors, parks & theaters & the BBC. There is nothing like the BBC in America---over there they do not publish my stuff as they do here, my poems & novel. I have done a commissioned article for Punch on my schooldays & have a chance for 3 weeks in May to be on the BBC Critics program* at about $150 a week, a fantastic break I hope I can make good on. Each critic sees the same play, art show, book, radio broadcast each week & discusses it. I am hoping it will finish furnishing this place & I can go to Court Green right after. As Marty for a copy of the details of the two places & the rent & maybe you could circulate them among your professor friends, too.
I appreciate your desire to see Frieda, but if you can imagine the emotional upset she has been through in losing her father & moving, you will see what an incredible idea it is to take her away by jet to America! I am her one security & to uproot her would be thoughtless & cruel, however sweetly you treated her at the other end. I could never afford to live in America---I get the best of doctor’s care here perfectly free & with children this is a great blessing. Also, Ted sees the children once a week & this makes him more responsible about our allowance. I have no desire ever to live in Wellesley, it always stifled me, & I think living with relatives is a very bad policy. I shall simply have to fight it out on my own over here. Maybe someday I can manage holidays in Europe with the children & so on. The children need me most right now & so I shall try to go on for the next few years writing mornings, being with them afternoons & seeing friends or studying & reading evenings.
My German au pair is food-fussy & boy-gaga, but I am d
TO Marcia B. Stern
Monday 4 February 1963
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dearest marty,
Your letter was like a shot of brandy or a shot in the arm, I’m not sure which, but wonderful. You are so blessedly understanding about everything, flu included. Everything has blown & bubbled & warped & split---accentuated by the light & heat suddenly going off for hours at unannounced intervals, frozen pipes, people getting drinking water in buckets & such stuff---that I am in a limbo between the old world & the very uncertain & rather grim new.* The best news of all is you & Mike coming. It is the nicest thing I’ve had to look forward to for an age---being cut off from my dearest friends & relatives has been very hard, but how wonderful that you will come! I long to have somebody really play with & love the babies---it is still a fantastic shock to me that they are so beautiful & dear & will have, in effect, no father. Ted comes once a week like a kind of a apocalyptic Santa Claus & when I’m in the country I guess half years & years will go by without him seeing them at all. Otherwise, he lives just for himself without a care in the world in a Soho flat, flying to Spain on holiday & so on & universally adored. You have no notion how famous he is over here now. I fought my way back to London as fast as I could because I wanted to face all the publicity & get it over with, as everybody I work for free-lance also employs Ted, & I have to start making a life of my own, having been catapulted out of the cow-like bliss of nursing Nick & maternity. Thank God it is a wellfare state & I can get free doctoring. How I wish you could see my beautiful country house. Maybe somehow, if no one is renting it this spring, we could all drive down.
Do stay closer than Kensington! I’ve heard friends recommend the Ivanhoe Hotel, Bloomsbury Street WC1 as very pleasant & central, & it’s right on the bus route here. How about that?
Your being my agent for the house & flat would be the most wonderful thing you could do, Marty. I was getting very depressed about the responsibility of this, America seemed so far away. This year, the London flat would be available from about May 20th (earlier next year) into October. Here’s info: 2 floor maisonette in Yeats’ house with 3 bedrooms, kitchen-dinette, bath, lounge & balcony just off Primrose Hill, Regents Park & the Zoo & minutes by tube & bus from the West End. Electric heaters, furnished, hot water electrically heated. Fridge. $60 per week plus light, phone, heat, gas. (Do you think this is okay for price---it’s a high class district). Minutes from launderette & all shops.
COURT GREEN: $30 a week, plus expenses of fuel, phone etc. Beautiful big thatched Devon country house with 2½ acres of garden & flowering trees: October to April (exact dates to be arranged). Three beds, study, bath, kitchen, dining kitchen, big sunny lino-tiled playroom, living room, Bendix, big fridge, Wilton carpets, electric immersion hot water heater, choice of wood, coal or electric fires. 4 hours express to Waterloo. English country town 20 mile from Exeter.
It would be wonderful if anybody wanted to work a whole year’s exchange, but a long let of either place would be wonderful, too. I should think the Yeats place would appeal to English professors on sabbatical!
I would love to go out to supper with you both & to a few movies or plays. I have been very lax about cooking & eating while alone in Devon & the problem of getting somebody to live in & help with the babes mornings so I can write & to be company for me & free me a few evenings is a big one. I now have a rather boycrazy & food-fussy german au pair whom I have to lecture to about maternal responsibility---it is pretty easy to get these in London, but none of them will go to the country for 5 months as far as I can see & it is there I most need someone. I am turning over the possibility of an older mother’s help-housekeeper sort of person, although I do find young girls more cheering.
How I do look forward to seeing you both & how very much I do need a spring tonic! I am dying to see what you think of my little Frieda & Nick.
Lots of love,
Syl.
TO Michael Carey
Monday 4 February 1963
TLS,* Assumption College
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dear Father Michael,
Please don’t worry about critiques or harshness,* I enjoy both. I’ve been silenced by everybody’s having flu & fevers & am just now creeping enough out o
f my post-flu coma to start to cope with sewing curtains & writing dawn poems,* and minding babies.
I don’t think any good poet wishes to be obscure. I certainly don’t; I write, at the present, in blood, or at least with it. Any difficulty arises from compression, or the jaggedness of images thrusting up from one psychic ground root.
How about Yeats for the lyrical?
All best wishes,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Monday 4 February 1963*
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I write from London where I have found a flat & an au pair and can see ahead financially for about a year. I thought I’d get an unfurnished flat, furnish it by poems & loans, & rent it out summers to tourists while I went back to Devon, to earn most of the rent for it & Ted says he’ll try to pay us about $280 a month while I try to make up the rest by writing. I have finally read the Fromm & think that I have been guilty of what he calls ‘Idolatrous love’,* that I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself, and this was why deeply underneath the marvelous loving, the writing, the babies I feared his loss, his leaving me & depended on him more & more, making him both idol & father. There was enough identity left to me in Devon to make me feel immense relief at his departure & at the prospect of divorce---now I shall grow out of his shadow, I thought, I shall be me. While we were married we were never apart & all experience filtered through each other. On a grownup level, I don’t think I could have endured a marriage of infidelities. I had a beautiful, virile, brilliant man & he still is, whatever immaturities there may be in his throwing over everything in such a violent way. He has said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on on our own.
What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst---cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies. Perhaps this is accentuated by my seeing Ted once a week when he comes to see Frieda---seeing how happy & whole & independent he is now, how much more I admire him like this, & what good friends we could be if I could manage to grow up too. He is gaga over this ad-agency girl who has gone back to live with her 3rd husband to keep the passion hot, although she did live for 3 weeks with Ted & flew to Spain for a holiday with him. If I were simply jealous about this it would be okay. But I know Spain and lovemaking would do me no good now, not until I find myself again. I feel I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death & found Fromm’s recommendation for concentration, patience & faith gave me a kind of peace,* but that I keep slipping into this pit of panic & deepfreeze, with my mother’s horrible example of fearful anxiety & “unselfishness” on one side & the beauties of my two little children on the other. I am living on sleeping pills & nerve tonic & have managed a few commissions for a magazine & the BBC and poems very good but, I feel written on the edge of madness. The publicity of Ted’s leaving is universal & I was taking it all with dignity & verve at first---people were buying poems & putting BBC work in my way, & I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud & give up. A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & the despair at being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on me like a cold, accusing wind. Just now it is torture to me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. Ironically my novel about my first breakdown is getting rave reviews over here.* I feel a simple act of will would make the world steady & solidify. No-one can save me but myself, but I need help & my doctor is referring me to a woman psychiatrist. Living on my wits, my writing---even partially, is very hard at this time, it is so subjective & dependent on objectivity. I am, for the first time since my marriage, relating to people without Ted, but my own lack of center, of mature identity, is a great torment. I am aware of a cowardice in myself, a wanting to give up. If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own Ted’s leaving would be hard, but manageable. But there is this damned, self-induced freeze. I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it. How can I get out of this ghastly defeatist cycle & grow up. I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me at this time, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself.
Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea.
With love,
Sylvia
Acknowledgements
A remarkable collaboration produced this edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. We have many people to thank. Editing Sylvia Plath’s letters began as an academic interterm course taught at Smith College by Karen V. Kukil for the Archives Concentration Program. Students in Editing Sylvia Plath’s Correspondence learned the art of exact and accurate transcription, proofreading, and emendation based upon primary resources. A few years before the class began, Rebecca Rosenthal, class of 2007, processed the correspondence in the Sylvia Plath Collection held by the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. From January 2009 to January 2013, students in Kukil’s interterm classes transcribed all the letters at Smith College. In January 2012 Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg co-taught the course and then proceeded to locate, transcribe, and annotate all the extant Sylvia Plath letters in other collections. This edition of Sylvia Plath’s letters is the product of our partnership with many students at Smith College, including Robin Whitham Acker ’12; Sylvia L. Altreuter ’12; Taylor A. Barrett ’15; Taylor M. Bayer ’12; Rachel E. Brenner ’14; Ingrid Brioso-Rieumont ’15; Virginia Choi ’11; Melanie S. Colvin ’13; Emily Cook ’11; Ellen Cormier ’11; Kristen L. De Lancey ’15; Caroline F. T. Doenmez ’09; Amanda P. Ferrara ’13; Hope C. Fried ’14; Alexandra Ghiz ’12; Noa R. Gutterman ’14; Kristen F. Haseney ’04; Catherine Hatas ’13; Victoria K. Henry ’13; Cheryl R. Holmes ’11; Katherine M. Horning ’13; Angelica Huertas ’10; Eve N. Hunter ’12; Salma Hussain ’14; Esra Karamehmet ’12; Jinjin Lu ’13; Emerson M. Lynch ’15; Taylor A. Marks ’15; Grace K. Martin ’13; Katherine A. Nelson ’12; Rebecca L. O’Leary ’13; Lois Jenkins Peters ’09; Emma Ramsay ’12; Anne M. Re ’13; Maris E. Schwarz ’15; Chelsea A. Seamon ’13; Joyce P. Shalaby ’13; Jihyun J. Shim ’14; Naomi Sinnathamby ’14; Gabrielle E. Termuehlen ’16; Dior Vargas ’09; Alexandra B. von Mering ’14; Drew L. Wagner ’11; Genevieve C. Ward- Wernet ’13; Erin M. Whelchel ’09; Kaidi Williams ’11; and Alison R. Winger ’14. Professor Adrianne Andrews and other faculty members at Smith College also participated in the project.
A number of family, friends, and professional contacts of Sylvia Plath provided information reflected in the footnotes. In addition to Frieda Hughes, we would like to thank Warren Plath and his daughters Susan Plath Winston and Jennifer Plath. We also appreciate the information received from Jane Baltzell-Kopp, Joan Cantor Barnes, Sarah Christie Bellwood, James B. Biery, Susan O’Neill-Roe Booth, Janet Burroway, Jonathan Christie, Susan Stetson Clarke, David Compton, Liadin Cooke, Blair Cruickshank, Ann Davidow-Goodman Hayes, Dena Dincauze, Jacquie Dincauze, Ruth Fainlight, Aidan Foster, Marian Foster, Johannes B. Frankfort, Nicholas Frankfort, Michael Frayn, Cary Plumer Frye, Charles S. Gardner, Ruth P. Geissler, Leo A. Goodman, Carol Hughes, Daniel Huws, Judy Kahrl, David N. Keightley, Elinor Friedman Klein, Lynne Lawner, Philip E. McCurdy, James McNeely, Eugene L. Mark, Doug Miller, Marcia Momtchiloff, Jane Nalieri, Kenneth Neville-Davies, Dr Richard Newell, Dr Perry Norton, Dr Richard A. Norton, Judith Raymo, Simon Sidamon-Eristoff, Elizabeth and William Sigmund, Robert Truslow, Louise Giesey White, Rosemary Wilson, J. Melvin Woody, and Nicolette Zeeman.
Professor Linda Wagner-Martin first articulated the need for a full edition of Sylvia Plath’s letters during her plenary lecture at the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Oxford University in 2007. A number of other scholars later contributed their insights and expertise as well. We would particularly like to thank professors Lynda K. Bundtzen (Williams College), Anita Helle (Oregon
State University), Dianne Hunter (Trinity College), and Susan Van Dyne (Smith College) for their guidance. In addition, we would like to thank Dr Amanda Golden (New York Institute of Technology) for sharing her expansive knowledge of Plath’s and Hughes’s pedagogy, marginalia, poetry, and literary influence. Dr Gail Crowther provided invaluable research and information, as well as immeasurable support during the project. Gail was a vital contributor in building the notes to add context to Plath’s activities. Gail located the two late letters to Gilbert and Marian Foster, which in addition to being fascinating documents add a new dimension to Plath’s late interpersonal relationships. Her friendship, advice, and expertise helped to make this book possible. Likewise, without the dedication, passion, and camaraderie of David Trinidad, this book would be a shell of itself. David compiled an initial list of known letters, believed in the project since its inception, shared tireless thoughts with us in Plath-like ‘bull sessions’, located letters, and provided information for the notes. The amount of credit Golden, Crowther, and Trinidad deserve is unquantifiable.