The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2

by Sylvia Plath

  *American poet Oscar Williams (1900–64). Williams mailed a sound recording of The Poems of Gene Derwood (Spoken Arts, 1955) to TH in 1958; now held by Smith College. Williams lived at 35 Water Street, New York.

  *TH added a note at the bottom of the letter, which has not been transcribed. TH noted it was nice to meet Williams and apologized for missing a party they were invited to attend.

  *SP sent seven poems to Williams which have not been transcribed: ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, ‘Departure of the Ghost’ [‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’], ‘Full Fathom Five’, ‘November Graveyard, Haworth’ [‘November Graveyard’], ‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad’, ‘Sculptor’, and ‘Sow’. SP inscribed ‘Black Rook’ on 4 June 1958: ‘For Oscar Williams—for his sweet basil, his tugboats, the sun & him self—Sylvia Plath’. Williams regularly took photographs of his guests; there is one of SP alone, one of TH alone, and one of SP & TH. Typescripts and photographs held by Lilly Library.

  *The Pocket Book of Modern Verse: English and American Poetry of the Last Hundred Years from Walt Whitman to Dylan Thomas (New York: Pocket Books, 1958). TH’s poems were: ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, ‘The Hag’, and ‘The Thought-Fox’.

  *Charles Montgomery Monteith (1921–95), editor and director of Faber & Faber, 1953–73, vice-chairman, 1974–6, chairman, 1977–80; TH’s editor; and Peter Francis du Sautoy (1912–95), director, Faber & Faber 1946–60, vice-chairman 1960–71, chairman 1971–7; member, Council, Publishers Association 1957–63, 1965–77, President 1967–9.

  *The New York Biltmore Hotel was at 335 Madison Avenue, New York.

  *American poet Gene Derwood (1909–54).

  *American literary critic and author Lionel Mordecai Trilling (1905–75); and American literary critic and author Diana Trilling (1905–96).

  *American novelist and literary critic Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914–94).

  *American editor, writer and publisher John Chipman Farrar (1896–1974); founder of Farrar & Rinehart, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  *Probably George Frederick Morgan (1922–2004); poet, founder and editor of The Hudson Review.

  *American poet and entrepreneur Hyman Jordan Sobiloff (1912–70).

  *Clyde Beatty (1903–65), a lion tamer and animal trainer. His brother, possibly Gail Tong.

  *Patricia O’Neil Pratson (1932– ); B.A. 1954, English, Smith College; SP’s friend from Wellesley. SP’s address book, held at Smith College, gives her address as Apt. 22: The Spencer University, 523 W 121st St, NYC. The building name is ‘The Spencer’ and is in the Morningside Heights/Columbia University district.

  *Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936); his Blood Wedding (1932), was performed at the Actors’ Playhouse at 100 Seventh Avenue South, New York.

  *Richard Wayne Wertz (1933–2002); B.A. 1955, Yale College; resident of Westminster College, Cambridge, 1955–6; M.Div. 1958, Yale Divinity School; Ph.D. 1967, Harvard University in history of American religion; roommate of Melvin Woody and Richard Sassoon at Yale College; dated SP, 1955–6; co-authored Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America.

  *Sallie McFague (1933– ), B.A. 1955, English, Smith College. An engagement announcement was printed in the New York Times on 2 February 1958; they did not marry.

  *Richard Laurence Sassoon (1934–2017); B.A. 1955, Yale College; attended the Sorbonne, 1955–6; dated SP, 1954–6. Sassoon was born in Paris, and raised in Tryon, North Carolina. There are very few letters from SP to Sassoon. SP biographer Andrew Wilson reports in his biography Mad Girl’s Love Song (2013) that Sassoon told him ‘Sylvia and I did correspond a lot and, long ago, visiting my parents’ house, I looked in the attic in a trunk where I kept her letters and they were not there, which is a total mystery.’ There are many letters from Sassoon to SP held by Lilly Library.

  *Marianne Moore lived in an apartment at 260 Cumberland Street, Brooklyn, New York.

  *Marianne Moore was the recipient of the Boston Arts Festival Poetry award and gave a reading in the Public Garden, Boston, on Sunday 15 June 1958. Moore’s poem, ‘A Festival’, was written for the occasion.

  *Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909–94); his The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve, 1950) and Jack (Jacques ou la soumission, 1955). The plays were performed at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, 181 Sullivan Street, New York.

  *SP recorded poems on Friday 13 June 1958, for the Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, at the Fassett Recording Studios. SP read ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, ‘Departure of the Ghost’ [‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’], ‘Mad Maudlin’ [‘Maudlin’], ‘Sow’, ‘November Graveyard, Haworth’ [‘November Graveyard’], ‘Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor’, ‘On the Plethora of Dryads’, ‘The Moon was a Fat Woman Once’ [‘The Thin People’], ‘The Disquieting Muses’, ‘Nocturne’ [‘Hardcastle Crags’], ‘Child’s Park Stones’, ‘Spinster’, ‘The Earthenware Head’ [‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’], ‘On the Difficulty on Conjuring Up a Dryad’, and ‘All the Dead Dears’.

  *SP was familiar with Sultan’s short story ‘The Fugue and the Fig Tree’, which appeared in The Best American Short Stories, 1953 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953). In The Bell Jar, SP’s protagonist Esther Greenwood reads this story when recovering from ptomaine poisoning.

  *Stanley Sultan, ‘The Art of Ulysses’ (Ph.D. thesis), Yale University, 1955.

  *Cabot Professor of English and Master of Adams House, an undergraduate residential house of Harvard University, Reuben A. Brower (1908–75).

  *American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92).

  *American poet and critic Babette Deutsch (1895–1982).

  *Author and translator Avrahm Yarmolinksy (1890–1975).

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘On the Plethora of Dryads’, New Mexico Quarterly 27 (Autumn 1957): 27.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Spinster’, The Guinness Book of Poetry 1956/57 (London: Putnam, 1958): 88. SP’s copy is held by Lilly Library.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Sow’, New Poems 1958 (London: Michael Joseph): 77–8; Ted Hughes, ‘Thrushes’, 53.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Pursuit’ and ‘Epitaph for Fire and Flower’, Best Poems of 1957: Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards 1958 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958): 73–4; and Ted Hughes, ‘Everyman’s Odyssey’, and ‘The Thought-Fox’, 43–4.

  *The MacDowell Colony is an artists’ colony founded in 1907 in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

  *Robert Lowell read in the Old Chapel Auditorium on 6 May 1958 at 7:00 p.m.; the event was sponsored by the Literary Society.

  *TH read ‘Crow Hill’, ‘Acrobats’, ‘To Paint a Water Lily’, ‘Witches’, ‘Relic’, ‘Dick Straightup’, ‘Historian’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘Bullfrog’, ‘View of a Pig’, and ‘Of Cats’.

  *This incident became the basis for SP’s short story ‘Above the Oxbow’. The story describes J. A. Skinner State Park on Mount Holyoke.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers’, which is set in Childs Park, Northampton, Mass.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Above the Oxbow’.

  *Howard Moss to SP, 24 June 1958; held by Smith College.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor’, New Yorker (9 August 1958): 22.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Night Walk’, New Yorker (11 October 1958): 40; later titled ‘Hardcastle Crags’. Correspondence about the title change from ‘Nocturne’ to ‘Night Walk’ for the periodical appearance is held in the New Yorker records, c. 1924–84 at the New York Public Library.

  *The exact number of poems and the titles SP sent are unknown. It is likely SP sent ‘A Lesson in Vengeance’, ‘The Death of Myth-Making’, and ‘On the Decline of Oracles’, which were accepted by September 1958 and published in Poetry 94 (September 1959): 368–71.

  *German-speaking Bohemian writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Child’s Park Stones’.

  *Possibly George Clapp Vaillant, Aztecs of Mexico: Origin, Rise, and Fall of the Aztec Nation (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1950, reprinted 19
55).

  *Swedish opera singer Johanna Maria (Jenny) Lind (1820–87).

  *According to SP’s calendar, she, TH, and Luke Myers ate a ‘depressing borscht & veal supper with Luke at bitter Franco Oriental’ in Paris on 29 June 1956. SP drew a display of bottles and flowers; see Journals of Sylvia Plath: 571.

  *According to SP’s address book, she and TH rented their apartment from Jacob Ham of Wm. C. Codman & Son of 30 Charles Street, Boston.

  *Ted Hughes, ‘The Bull Moses’.

  *Alfred Sherwood Romer, Man and the Vertebrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).

  *Harold Munro Fox, The Personality of Animals (New York: Penguin Books, 1947).

  *American marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (1907–64); her The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).

  *Rachel Carson, Under the Sea Wind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941).

  *The Plaths lived at 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Mass., 1936–42.

  *The poem is no longer with the letter. However, a copy signed ‘Sylvia Plath’ in the top right hand corner, and likely the one SP sent, can be found in Poems, N–Z; held by Lilly Library.

  *SP added this sentence by hand in the margin.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Lorelei’.

  *Heinrich Heine, ‘Die Lorelei’. The first line is ‘Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten’.

  *Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Mit 100 Bildern Nach Aquarellen (Munich: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt, 1937); SP’s copy held by Emory University. Contains Schoenhof’s Foreign Book, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., bookseller label. With presentation inscription: ‘Sylvia, für ein gutes Kind von ihrer liebende Mutter, 12/25/54’.

  *Probably Ted Hughes, ‘An Otter’.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Incommunicado’.

  *Warren Plath arrived in New York, from Cuxhaven, Germany, on the MV Italia on 24 August 1958.

  *Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (London: Hogarth Press, 1949); SP’s copy held by Smith College. The location of SP’s copy of Duino Elegies is unknown.

  *Probably Ted Hughes, ‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’ and ‘The Good Life’, The Spectator 201 (4 July 1958): 19; ‘The Retired Colonel’, The Spectator 201 (22 August 1958): 260; ‘Things Present’, The Spectator 201 (3 October 1958): 454; and ‘Pennines in April’, The Spectator 201 (26 December 1958): 922.

  *David Louis Posner to TH; Posner (1938–85) was curator of the Poetry Collection. The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, holds TH’s reply, undated.

  *Austrian artist and writer Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980).

  *Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947); SP’s copy, a birthday present from TH dated 27 October 1958; held by Smith College.

  *Robert Lowell and his wife, American writer Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007), divorced 1972. The Lowells lived at 239 Marlborough Street, Boston.

  *Dr Robert Emery Brownlee (1911–2006). A resident of Wellesley, Brownlee was affiliated with the Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Mass., and the New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

  *According to SP’s address book, Ruth and Arthur Geissler lived at 5 MacArthur Road, Natick, Mass.

  *Howard Moss to SP, 22 July 1958; held by New York Public Library.

  *Date supplied from internal evidence.

  *SP added a note to a letter typed by TH, which has not been transcribed. TH included his poem ‘Pennines in April’ and alluded to ‘Pike’.

  *Ted Hughes, ‘Groom’s Dream’ [‘A Dream of Horses’] and ‘Constancy’, London Magazine 5 (August 1958): 17–18.

  *Ted Hughes, ‘Witches’, New Statesman 56 (9 August 1958): 173. In Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography, 1946–1980 (London: Mansell, 1983), no other poem appeared after ‘Witches’ until ‘Of Cats’, New Statesman 56 (25 October 1958): 564.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Beach Plum Season on Cape Cod’, Christian Science Monitor (14 August 1958): 17. The two drawings have the following captions: ‘Picking over beach plums under the pines’ and ‘Potted plants and a wheelbarrow of beach plums’.

  *Sylvia Plath, ‘Departure of the Ghost’ [‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’], published with ‘Point Shirley’, Sewanee Review 67 (Summer 1959): 446–8. See Monroe K. Spears to SP, 7 August 1958; held by Sewanee: The University of the South.

  *Jean-Henri Fabre, The Life of the Spider and The Life of the Scorpion, editions read unknown.

  *The Edward A. Hatch Memorial Shell is an outdoor concert venue on the Charles River Esplanade.

  *Now the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, 50 Park Plaza at Arlington Street, Boston.

  *TH asked American poets Babette Deutsch and Marianne Moore to recommend him for a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; SP asked Moore to recommend her for the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship.

  *John Crosby (1912–91) was the radio–television critic for the New York Herald Tribune, 1946–65; he also hosted the television show The Seven Lively Arts on CBS, 1957–8.

  *Protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

  *D. H. Lawrence, Complete Short Stories (London: Heinemann, 1955); SP’s copy held by Smith College.

  *Lynne Lawner, ‘If he stroke my cheek’, New World Writing: Tenth Mentor Selection (New York: New American Library, 1956): 46.

  *Ted Hughes, ‘Sunday’ and ‘The Rain Horse’.

  *Boston Public Library, located at Boylston and Dartmouth Streets, Boston.

  *Date supplied from internal evidence.

  *‘The Thought-Fox’, winner of the Guinness Poetry Award of £300, 1958. See T. L. Marks to TH, 1 September 1958; held by Emory University.

  *Alice Norma Davis (1908–84); B.A. 1930, Smith College; director of the Vocational Office, Smith College, 1947–72. See Alice Norma Davis to SP, 23 September 1958; held by Smith College.

  *Dorothea Krook, untitled book review of The House of Fiction by Henry James, edited and introduced by Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), London Magazine 5 (July 1958): 68–70.

  *French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80).

  *In addition to The Waste Land, SP taught ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’.

  *SP taught ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’, ‘Fish in the Unruffled Lakes’, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘Law, Say the Gardeners is the Sun’, ‘Look, Stranger’, and ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ by Auden and ‘After the Funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘The Hunchback in the Park’, ‘Over Sir John’s Hill’, and ‘Twenty-Four Years’ by Thomas.

  *John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671).

  *SP was born in the Jennie M. Robinson Memorial Hospital, at Harrison Avenue and E Newton Street, Boston.

  *Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James (New York: G. Braziller, 1955); SP’s copy held by Emory University.

  *SP’s notes held by Lilly Library.

  *Immigration records show Krook travelled in autumn 1957, not 1958. She departed England on the Queen Mary on 12 September 1957 bound for New York, and arrived back in Southampton on the Greek Line SS New York on 28 October 1957.

  *Garry Eugene Haupt (1933–79), American; B.A. 1955, Yale College; B.A. 1957, English, Pembroke College, Cambridge; dated SP in 1956.