The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
Page 131
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sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 5 April 1956
ALS (picture postcard), Indiana
PARIS – La Seine au Quai d’Anjou.
Thursday – April 5:
2.
Dearest mother –
Here is one of the vistas in which I have wandered with my sketchbook went up to Montmartre under domes of sacré coeur with Tony (a very sweet Oxford chap) & had delectable dinner, iced white wine & a silouhette cut as a present amid crowds of onlookers in the central square saw two plays by Cocteau & Anouilh, and last night with Gordon, a fine ballet at the Opera – Cocteau’s version of Racine’s “Phèdre” – Am most brave & desolate without Richard – he being still on vacation in south – and hope that trip with Gordon via Munich, Venice, Florence & Rome will help me forget my loneliness for a week – am flying back to London on April 13 (Friday!) – do write to me c/o Am. Express in Rome before then
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 17 April 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Tuesday afternoon, April 17
Dearest of mothers . . .
I am back at Whitstead at last, grateful to rest in peace, to see no more trains or hotel rooms, to stop running. I didn’t get any of your letters all my vacation because of the imbecilic American Express, and so felt terribly cut off from all communication for that time and was glad to get back to my calm, daffodil-starred yet chilly Cambridge and find mail.
It hurts terribly in my heart not to be home with you all, helping you through this hard hard time with grammy; I cannot believe that I will never see her again, and wish that you would make as much effort as you can to give her some of the power of the love I have for her. I feel so cut off, and all my strength so futile here. I love that woman so, and all of you, and would give anything to share the sorrow and the adoration for dear grammy in the community of our family and our neighborhood.
Most of all, I am concerned for you. Will grampy live with Dot and Joe this summer? Because you must come to England. I know the mere prospect of injections or passport must seem insurmountable now, but that is all you must go through, and on the ship you can rest and read the pamphlets or guide books you wish, or just lie in the sun, and the food is good (remember to take seasick pills just in case). I shall meet you at Southampton and take complete charge of you for two weeks; I’ll plan a slow relaxed time, and do all the arranging; only let me know definitely if you will arrive the 13th and how long you want to stay, and what places you would like to go most besides London and Cambridge; I shall arrange all the rest, and you can just give yourself into my hands.
Now your birthday is coming up this next week, and I know you will hardly think of it, with all your grieving and concern. However, I would like to order you to take at least from $30 to $50 from my money I sent and buy yourself the lightest and prettiest of weekend suitcases. I refuse to let you carry my large case which is heavy even for me, and a weekend case the size of the one I had would be just right. Ive learned that its most important to travel very very light and to take a few things one really loves to wear over and over. Another thing, it is most important to be warm: and in rainy weather, I imagine Austria, and surely England, can be frigid even in summer. So do bring one pair of flannel pajamas, a good warm thick wool sweater (more like a skisweater) and some sort of bathrobe, perhaps. Be sure you have warm stockings and shoes. Otherwise, your plans sound fine. Don’t spend any of the money on clothes, because that is of least importance. One black suit or dress, for eve theater or churchgoing; a sweater and shirt, and nylon blouses for walking and daytime. Get a lovely suitcase (maybe Mrs. Cantor can help you) and be sure its light as a feather! Happy Birthday, and remember that I’ll be thinking of you and planning to give you England as a delayed present!
I have been having a rather strenuous time, myself of late, and much to deal with. Richard went off to Spain for a month to think things over and was miserable alone and wrote long letters which I didn’t receive till I got back here, too late, after feeling terribly deserted in Paris that last week: Giovanni Perego, the communist reporter, was like a kind father and I don’t know what I’d have done without his comfort and hot milk and support. Gordon was also a mistake; I should know by now that there is always bound to be a hidden rankling between the rejector and rejected. In spite of this I managed to enjoy much, although fighting a great sorrow and preferring to be alone, rather than with him.
We left Paris for Munich where I froze in a blizzard and Gordon’s utter lack of language ability & blundering horrified me, I must admit. We left the next morning (he’d vaguely wanted to see the university) through Austria and the Tyrolean Alps; I sat with my nose pressed to the window and almost cried as we went through Insbruck. Two days in Venice, in a gondola and exploring the little streets & bridges, then to Rome for 5 days where by utter accident we ran into Donald Cheney* (remember him: my 6th grade rival!) who’d gone to Choate with Gordon & was on a Fulbright in Rome! I saw much of him & it was heaven to be with someone who spoke the language: sat in sun eating dates in Roman forum, Colisseum, sunlit Spanish steps, lovely spurting fountains everywhere, art museums, Renaissance palaces, Sistine chapel & Vatican (I stared for hours in reverence at Michaelangelo’s ceiling & last judgement); yet was happy to fly to London Friday the 13th in 4 hours! Greeted by smudgy black rain & cold, but had wash in posh London club & steak dinner there with charming South African ex-Cambridge man* I met on plane. Now back to recuperate, write, work. I am writing for the college newspaper, & should have some sketches & an article on Paris* in this week; god, it’s good to get back to newsprint & an office! I think I’ll get along fine; all very nice, honest guys. The most shattering thing is that in the last two months I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt: I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Cambridge, brilliant poet whose work I loved before I met him,* a large hulking healthy Adam, half French, half Irish, with a voice like the thunder of God; a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer & vagabond who will never stop. The times I am with him are a horror because I am then so strong & creative & happy, and his very power & brilliance & endless health & iron will to beat the world across is why I love him and never will be able to do more, for he’ll blast off to Spain & then Australia & never stop conquering people & saying poems. It is very hard to have him here in Cambridge this week & I am terrified even to have known him, he makes all others mere puny fragments. Such a torment & pain to love him.
ah, well, Forgive my own talk of hurt & sorrow! I love you so & only wish I could be home to help you in yours.
All my love –
sivvy
TO Edward Weeks
Tuesday 17 April 1956
TLS (photocopy), Yale University
Whitstead 4
Barton Road
Cambridge, England
April 17, 1956
Editor Edward Weeks
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
8 Arlington Street
Boston 16, Massachusetts
Dear Editor Weeks:
I am writing from a gabled attic near the Backs of the River Cam where I’m studying for two years at Cambridge University on a Fulbright grant.
Enclosed please find a whole batch of new poems,* some of which I hope you may find suitable for publication in the Atlantic.
Thanking you, as always, for your time and consideration,
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Karl Shapiro
Tuesday 17 April 1956
TLS, University of Chicago
Whitstead 4
Barton Road
Cambridge, England
April 17, 1956
Editor Karl Shapiro*
POETRY
60 W. Walton Street
Chicago 10, Illinois
&nbs
p; Dear Editor Shapiro:
Enclosed please find a batch of poems,* some of which I hope you may find suitable for publication in Poetry. I’ve had poems published previously in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, Mademoiselle, and the New Orleans Poetry Journal.
Thanking your for your time and consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Richard Sassoon
Wednesday 18 April 1956
TL (excerpt),* Smith College
April 18*
now the forces are gathering still against me, and my dearest grandmother who took care of me all my life while mother worked is dying very very slowly and bravely of cancer, and she has not even been able to have intravenous feeding for six weeks but is living on her body, which will be all sublimed away, and then only she may die. my mother is working, teaching, cooking, driving, shoveling snow from blizzards, growing thin in the terror of her slow sorrow. I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father’s slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother’s dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.
something very terrifying too has happened to me, which started two months ago and which needed not to have happened, just as it needed not to have happened that you wrote that you did not want to see me in paris and would not go to italy with me. when I came back to london, there seemed only this one way of happening, and I am living now in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought.* I took care, such care, and even that was not enough, for my being deserted utterly. you said that when you returned to paris, you said that you told me “brutally” your vacation would be spent. well, mine is spent too, brutally, and I am spent, giving with both hands, daily, and the blight and terror has been made in the choice and the superfluous unnecessary and howling void of your long absence. your handwriting has gone so wild and racked not all the devils could burn a meaning out of it.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 19 April 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Thursday morning, April 19
Dearest mother . . .
I have not heard from you in several days and wish with all my heart that these times are not trying beyond endurance. Know I think of you momently, and grammy, and will with all the fierce force of willing I have to make my love cross the seas to you.
I shall tell you now about something most miraculous and thundering and terrifying and wish you to think on it and share some of it. It is this man, this poet, this Ted Hughes. I have never known anything like it: for the first time in my life I can use all my knowing and laughing and force and writing to the hilt all the time, everything, and you should see him, hear him:
He is tall, hulking, with a large-cut face, shocks of dark brown hair and blazing green & blue flecked eyes; he wears the same old clothes all the time: a thick black sweater & wine-stained khaki pants. His voice is richer and rarer than Dylan Thomas, booming through walls and doors: he stalks into the room and yanks a book out of my cases: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thomas, and begins to read. He reads his own poems which are better than Thomas and Hopkins many times, and better than all I know: fierce, disciplined with a straight honest saying. He tells me endless stories, in the Irish spinning way, dropping his voice to a hush and acting some out, and I am enchanted: such a yarn-spinner. He is 25 and from Yorkshire, and has done everything in the world: rose-grafting, plowing, reading for movie studios, hunting, fishing; he reads horoscopes, knows Joyce, so much much more than I, but all I love. He is a violent Adam, and his least gesture is like a derrick; unruly, yet creative as God speaking the world; he was a discus-thrower.
He has a health and hugeness so that the more he loves, the more he loves, the more he writes poems, the more he writes poems; he knows all about the habits of animals and takes me amid cows and coots; I am writing poems, & they are better and stronger than anything I have ever done: here is a small one about one night we went into the moonlight to find owls:
Metamorphosis*
Haunched like a faun, he hooed
from grove of moon-glint and fen-frost
until all owls in the twigged forest
flapped black to look and brood
on the call this man made.
No sound but a drunken coot
lurching home along river bank;
stars hung water-sunk, so a
rank of double star-eyes lit
boughs where those owls sat.
An arena of yellow eyes
watched the changing shape he cut,
saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout
goat-horns; heard how god rose
and galloped woodward in that guise.
------------------
Daily I am full of poems; my joy whirls in tongues of words. There is a price, always, and the price I can pay: he is arrogant, used to walking over women like a blast of Jove’s lightning, but I am a match: I feel a growing strength, I do not merely idolize, I see right into the core of him, and he knows it, and knows that I am strong enough, and can make him grow. Strange, but all the women he has known and will know bother me not at all. I know myself, in vigor and prime and growing, and know I am strong enough to keep myself whole, no matter what. He is a breaker of things and people; I can teach him care, can use every fiber of wisdom I have to give him growing gentleness of others.
Living in this sick small insular inbred land he has gone wild and become a breaker: drinking and charging about with his glorious poet-friends: but this will change if he gets somewhere the land is big enough, free enough for his colossal gestures. In the midst of my knowing that there is no other man like this, no other man who could breed supermen, with all the vigor of mind and body in this world of cerebralism and with the primitive force too, which has split off in our pale white-collared race---in the midst of this, I accept these days and these livings for I am growing and shall be a woman beyond women for my strength. I have never be so exultant, the joy of using all my wit and womanly wisdom is a joy beyond words; what a huge humor we have, what running strength!
We had dinner last week at Luke Myer’s, a fine American boy-poet whose poems are fine in their way as Ted’s: no precocious hushed literary circles for us: we write, read, talk plain and straight and produce from the fiber of our hearts and bones. Luke’s girl was an artist, and I fell in love with her right away. Ted knows music, so we listen to Beethoven & Bartok in record shops, for free, & I’m making dinner for Ted & a mutual Jewish friend Iko next week, & we’ll go listen to Iko’s Beethoven. I am happy, in the midst of all jeopardy, and this spring in Cambridge, with Ted here even for a little before he goes off to Spain, and then Australia, is utter joy. I am beyond jealousy, which I something I thought I’d never come to: because myself is fun enough & joy enough, even in sorrow, to make a life! Please think of me, accepting sorrow & pain, but living in the midst in a singing joy which is the best of Hopkins, Thomas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Donne, and all the poets we love together.
Your own loving,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 21 April 1956
TLS with envelope,
Indiana University
Saturday morning
April 21
Dearest of mothers . . .
I only hope the paradoxical joy of my being and intense sense of living as richly and deeply as ever in the world may shed some power and solace in the middle of your dark sad time. I shall tell you most amazing news:
The best thing is my joining Varsity! The Cambridge weekly paper! Here, enclosed,* is my first feature and the two upper sketches are mine! The Fulbright commission should go wil
d with delight. Already I am assigned interviews, fashion stories, sketching at a horse-race! I dearly love the boys on the paper, and as there are only two girl reporters,* I feel like Marguerite Higgins, only better!
Guess what: the feature editor* has invited me to drive to London on Tuesday with him to a large reception for Bulganin and Kruschev* at the Claridge hotel! I am drunk with amazement: shall go wrapped in bunting of stars & stripes! Your daughter drinking in the same room with the heads of Russia!
All gathers in incredible joy. I cannot stop writing poems! They come better and better. They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth that Ted is teaching me: we walked 15 miles yesterday through wood, field and fen, and came home through moonlit granchester and fields of sleeping cows. I cook steaks, trout on my gas ring, and we eat well; we drink sherry in the garden and read poems; we quote on and on: he says a line of Thomas or Shakespeare and says: Finish! We romp through words: I learn new words and use them in poems. My god. Listen: here are two lyrics; they are meant to be said aloud, and they are from my joy in discovering a world I never knew: all nature.
Ode for Ted*
From under crunch of my man’s boot
green oat-sprouts jut;
he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout
legging it most nimble
to sprigged hedge of bramble,
stalks redfox, shrewd stoat.
Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt
up from delved worm-haunt;
blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint
he with rock splits open