by Sylvia Plath
I can’t tell you with what joy I read of Warren’s Experiment fellowship to Austria! I am proud as proud; if any boy deserves it, he does. I want very much for Ted to meet him, as Ted at last is a man worthy of my brother, and I want Warren to know Ted. I hope you will have the chance to meet Ted in Paris where his older sister* is living and working.
Yesterday, it was gray and brilliant; Ted & I had salmon sandwiches, sausages and a glass of red wine on the outdoor punt docks of the Cam, throwing crumbs to swans and basking in the sun and our projects which sprout merry and many as stars in the sky. I have the most blazing idea of all, now: out of the many vital, funny, and profound experiences as an American girl in Cambridge, I am going to write a series of tight, packed, perfect short stories which I shall make into a novel, and this is what I shall apply to the Saxton fund for money to do. I shall begin it in Spain this summer, and hope to finish it at the end of the year following graduation.
All the notes I’ve taken on socialized medecine, British men, characters, will come in. Ted is with me all the way, and we are rather excited about this; it is “my own corner” and his criticism as it is in progress, from the British slant, with his infallible eye, will be invaluable. What a product of the Fulbright! My work on Varsity next year will take me into the heart of Cambridge, and I can really make a fine thing of this: starting with the voyage over, and having about a year’s time covered. Will try to sell the stories separately in the New Yorker and Mademoiselle.
Yesterday I discovered another wonderful thing about Ted and me together: he sat on the couch all afternoon and read my copy of Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” while I wrote a bright, witty 10-page article on the Bulganin reception which I’m sending, on a long chance, to the New Yorker, and I re-wrote my Paris article and sent it with sketches to the Monitor. Never before have I composed and worked with a man around, and I felt so at one with Ted, so happy and better able to work than ever before in my life. Every aspect of my personality is growing vivid, shaped, and creative about him.
You will definitely meet him this summer. He may shock you at first, unless you imagine a big unruly Huckleberry Finn: he hasn’t even a suit of clothes, he is so poor, and wears new dungarees and an old black sweater which I must mend at the elbows this week; he has his rugged handsomeness, his godlike voice, his brilliant mind (we are going to learn anatomy & zoology together), his huge unquenchable want to write which pours poems and stories out of him like Niagra: once he starts to publish, the world will be a different place. Our mutual feelings for how to live is simply to be honest, straight, grow every day to new learning & joy; to eat well, write always and work hard in the sweat of god’s sun.
The hardest thing for me now is not to share all this with a rich community of friends; I hope Sue will be able to help me take a little the the pressure off next year; it is like having discovered the one only biggest diamond mine in the world and having to sit inside alone full of radiance, and not tell anyone. But I can tell you, if you will sit tight on it, that within a year, after I graduate, I can think of nothing I’d rather do than be married to Ted; I know he would want this, too, and we are doing all we can just to look ahead to the summer, before he has to go to Australia next fall. He is signed up to go on a kind of British program which pays the way of the men who will work over there; I can let him go, knowing as I do that he will stalk back over the world to claim me when the proper time is come. There is no question, just a case of waiting till that time is come.
Statistically, by the way, he will be 26 this August; served in the RAF as radio mechanic 2 years before Cambridge, graduated from Cambridge in 1954, and has worked at everything from grafting roses to reading for a movie studio. Now, this summer, he will be writing and waiting for his ship to leave for Australia.
All the social questions about money, family position, bank accounts, blow off like chittering irrelevancies in a cyclone before two people who depend solely on their native talent and love of honesty, frankness, and the beauty of this various world; we will work and hack out the best of lives. Oh, mother, take this to your own secret heart and share it with me; you will I hope be able to understand how this is the only real basis of lifetime love: the feeling that another being’s soul and health without adornment of wealth or prestige, is enough to carry the world on it’s shoulders.
much love from your own
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 6 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Sunday noon, May 6
Dearest mother . . .
A small happy note before I go out in the Whitstead gardens to sit under a full-bloom cherry tree and read Plato in halter & shorts. The Aldriches came about 3 yesterday afternoon and we had the most idyllic day! I just hope they had half as good a time as I had.
Weather was warm and blue, and after a little talk in my room here, Ted and I took them punting up the most beautiful part of the “Backs” under willows and by the colleges; Duane took some snapshots and Ted looked like a colossal Huck Finn, or Charon piloting us over the River of Paradise instead of Styx. Duane even took over the punt for a short way and did fine! All my friends were out boating, saying hello, and I felt so intensely happy at being able to share my dear Cambridge.
Then all four of us drove over to Granchester to have a full tea--- sandwiches, scones, pancakes and honey---in the apple orchard among twittering birds. Then Ted & I dropped off to wash up and met Betty and Duane at the hotel* we’d found them for the night and we went out to the most sumptuous dinner* I’ve had since coming back from Europe. Roast duck and orange sauce, the most delicious Chablis wine, hundreds of assorted cheeses & cognac. Duane and Ted seemed to get on fine, and we had a lovely easy laughing meal which lasted till about 10. All the waiters, who knew me already, made little jokes and were very sweet. I can’t tell you how touching Ted was: he has just his dungarees and he borrowed a new black and white checked shirt from his poet friend Luke and I polished his shoes: I could walk into the Royal Palace and feel proud of him, just as he is, and I felt Duane and Betty would accept him for that, too.
Then I thought over to myself about how my friends would accept this man of mine: with nothing to his name but the shirt on his back and the most magnificent soul and voice and body that ever were: all the couples I know and love---Marty and Mike Plumer, Claiborne and Avrom Handleman, Louise & Eddie White, Betsy and Bob MacArthur, the Crocketts, Patsy---all would love him and listen to him and take him for the fine man he is. And this is all I could ever ask for.
Ted has changed so in the two months I’ve known him that it is incredible, just as I’ve changed too: from being bitter, selfish, despairing of ever being able to use our whole selves, our whole strengths, without terrifying other people, we have turned into the most happy magnanimous creative pair in the world: Ted says himself that I have saved him from being ruthless, cynical, cruel and a warped hermit because he never thought there could be a girl like me and I feel that I too have new power by pouring all my love and care in one direction to someone strong enough to take me in my fullest joy (it is interesting to know that most Cambridge boys preferred me when I was sick with sinus and they could take care of me, because that was the only time they were stronger). I know how straight and good Ted can grow and will not have anything less; he wants this, and likes the kind of self he is with me, as I am utterly at peace and joyously my best when with him. I do hope you can meet him in Paris, mother; he is the dearest, kindest, most honest man that ever lived, and if, for my faith and work and fighting to re-make him daily according to his best potential, I can at the end of my course here live with him the rest of my life, I can think of no better way to sing my songs in the world: creating stories, babies and poems and delectable meals. On the most limited financial budget and the biggest potential capital of talent & native ability I’ve ever met.
much much love,
sivvy
PS: a f
ew random jottings: am ecstatic about Warren’s Experiment fellowship! Congratulate him a hundred times for me, and let me know when and where he’ll be there! Ted might hitch-hike to Austria with me to meet Warren, I’d just love the two of them to meet!
About your trip: do bring as many wash’n’dri packs as possible: they are godsends: put a few into handbag while traveling, whip one out when you feel grimy, and your old makeup comes off and your skin feels braced and fresh, and you can begin all over.
If it isn’t too much, in passing, could you get a couple of those Christian Science Monitor sets & send them over with my Joy of Cooking: cooking is certainly my happiest domestic joy! I love it utterly & was made to cook!
Also, I’d love one or two of those lovely simple white nylon slips (without lace, just borders of nylon) for the summer: the styles here are lousy.
And tell me whether you’ll be coming morning noon or night of June 13th so I can make plans: roughly, even, what time! I’ll be there doing jigs of joy on the docks at Southampton: am writing Paris about reservations this week! We will have such fun together! Will also try to hitch-hike up from Spain to make you and Mrs. Prouty on August 6th: Spain is my base for writing & I’m beginning my novel this summer. Am not going to Cambridge summer school after all. Hope you’ll help me choose my Olivetti Letteretta 22* this June in London!
love again, your happy
sivvy
PS: at last received package: shirt is lovely, slippers like angel’s garb; am not bothering with thyroid anymore and feel fine.
xxxx
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 9 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Wednesday morning, May 9
Dear mother . . .
It is a lovely gray day, with the wet smell of cherry blossoms and lilacs in the air; outside Whitstead, the white lilac bush is coming into full bloom, and there is in the hedge a nest of four blackbirds which I have been following on their progress from mottled blue eggs to large, blinking, feathered children.
Do you realize that in about a month from the time you receive this, I’ll be meeting you at Southampton? I am so excited: I am going to start this week finding out about cars and licences; is my red wallet with my licence in it at home? I wish you’d just look to make sure I didn’t leave it there. I cant seem to locate it here.
Had a wonderful supervision with dear shining Doctor Krook yesterday morning on Plato again: I do a paper every week, read it and discuss violently; I know she has fun, and feel that by the time I am through with this course in the middle of next year, we will be good friends; already we are communicating about our own private feelings & opinions: everything relates. Had the most moving discussion of the idea of the Trinity with her, a revelation to me of the blind stupid ignorance I had in not even “listening” to such conceptions: I am standing at the juncture of Greek and Christian thought, now, and it is magnificent to see what the mind of man has made, the significance of the development from the dialectical inquiries of Socrates to the Epistles of St. Paul, which will be my next port after Aristotle. Never has my mind been so eager, so keen, so able to make leaps and sallies into new understanding!
In a very real sense, all this fresh directive power and creativity is due to my growing love for Ted. He has changed so in the time I have known him from a boy afraid of being vulnerable and committed (and therefore cruel and destructive) to the most loving, tender, careful, dear man in the world. His goal is not a particular job, or a particular place, narrowly, in the world, but a “way of life” with one right woman, and I know that this is the way I want to live, and it is the only way for me. Together, as he said, our lives would be worth living out even if we never set foot out of a shack in the ugly sooty midst of Birmingham; meaning, of course, that no matter what comes, however little, the least is better together than the worldly “most” with anyone else.
Both of us want to live in the world, mastering each country, writing and giving to the people, until we re-create the whole world in our words. Ted is probably the most brilliant boy I know: I am constantly amazed at his vast fund of knowledge and understanding: not facts or quotes of second-hand knowledge, but an organic, digested comprehension which enriches his every word. He has a phenomenal ability to learn languages, & I have, by some miracle, drawn up from inside him the desire not to go to Australia next year but to find a job teaching English in Spain, so I can see him during vacations and make the next year, no doubt the hardest in both our lives, having to be apart so much, bearable. My most cherished dream, which you must think of only as a dream so far, is to bring him home with me next June for a sort of enormous barbeque in Wellesley to which I will invite all the neighbors, young couples, and dear people like Mrs. Prouty & Dr. Beuscher, et al. just to meet him before we set out on our world-wandering; not really wandering, but living & teaching English in country after country, writing, mastering languages and having many many babies.
Oh, mummy, I have never been so calm and peaceful and happy in my life; if it is this way, with all the awkward limitations of our separate positions now, me studying, he having to work, it will be incredible to fight out a life side by side. We are both ripe and mature, sure, because of so much experience in the world, so much waste of our true energies, of our wish to have one undeviating faith and love our lives long and to commit every fiber & dream to forging this life: always growing straight in the light of each other. I am so glad you and Warren are coming this summer, so you can meet him. If only you both will just take him for what he is, in his whole self, without wealth, or a slick 10-year guarantee for a secure job, or a house & car---just for his native dearness, story-telling, poem-making, nature-loving, humorous, rugged self---I am sure you will be as drawn to him as I could wish. To find such a man, to make him into the best man the world has seen: such a life work! I know I was not meant to be a single woman, a career woman, and this is my reward for waiting and waiting and not accepting all the lesser tempting offers which would have betrayed my capacity for growing beyond thought into the fulness of my middle and late years.
I am beginning my novel in Spain this summer, working on it next year, and using Varsity to get in every nook & cranny of Cambridge: it is my corner, and such a salable subject! I’ll try to sell the stories to Mlle & the NYorker, & get some grant to finish it & rewrite it to unity the year following graduation, along with a book of poems. Honestly, my whole being just sings straight with purpose and projects: you must come and share this joy! You’ll be a proud grandmother yet! Probably quadruplets when the time comes: statesmen, scientists, artists and discus-throwers!
Much love from your own,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 10 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Thursday morning, May 10
Dearest mother . . .
You will no doubt think I have gone utterly potty to be writing you so many letters, but I am at that time when a girl wants to share all her joys and wonders at her one man with those who will understand and be happy about it, and I miss your presence more now than I did in all the hard times during the winter then I was unhappy, uncreative and discouraged about the course my life was to take. Please bear with my volubility at this point! I have no girl here like Sue or Marty with whom I can share my happiness (without their feeling secretly jealous, as do all girls who do not have that strong singleness of purpose which love brings) and I really long for a woman confidante.
I hope so much you will be able to get to know Ted; one look in his eyes will tell you what marvelous care I shall have at his hands: I have never felt so protected and at one in my life. He is the one boy with whom I can be perfectly “alone” with myself, utterly creative, working and at peace, while he is in the same room, partly because we have such an “I-thou” feeling that we
are never outside the medium of our mutual presence; I can’t consider him objectively as a “thing” as I could every other man I’ve ever known; I can be critical of him, truly, but only because I know the best he can be and wish to work with him always so he will grow toward this, as he feels about me. Yesterday, a gray rainy day, I sat and wrote an article for an Oxford magazine while he read DeQuincey and worked on a poem; we have such a completely at-ease time of it: my stopping to ask his advice about a metaphor, he telling me about anthropology. We got two enormous books of Siberian fairy-tales & Magyar folk-tales out of the University library and are reading them aloud every evening. His imagination has brought to life all the goblin and fairy and witch lore I ever loved as a child, and I shall slowly return to that magic state: we spent a whole afternoon looking at Arthur Rackham drawings for Rip Van Winkle and Peter Pan. Ted can draw, too, and once wanted to do just that; he has a brother Gerald,* 10 years older than he, with a family in Australia, and Gerald sells all his paintings (which he only does for fun: he hunts & fishes most) and is an aircraft mechanic; he has an older sister, Olwyn, in Paris, and Ted is the youngest. I have never enjoyed drawing so much, and will get a sketch-book of stylized drawings slowly together over our travels; the whole world is our country, and we shall travel and live everywhere, teaching English and learning the languages of each country, writing and drawing and me cooking and learning international dishes. With Ted, and his natural inborn talents, I need nothing but himself: we’ll spin the rest in our words and drawings and actions, and be the truest simplest loving people under the sun.