by Sylvia Plath
Tomorrow I am suiting my actions to my words and taking Ted to meet the Duke of Edinburgh at the Fulbright reception in London; he has one old suit, which I haven’t seen, and will resurrect it for the occasion: I don’t care what it’s like, for I feel my love and faith in Ted will make what he wears or has like the emperor’s new clothes: I look at him and he is dressed in purple and gold cloth and crowned with laurel: and the world will come to see him in the light of my look, even as I shall be the most beautiful woman in the blazing sun of his belief in me. So there it is, the two of us, and each morning I wake incredulous with a song in my heart and say: “Ted” to myself, and the day jumps up straight and creative as solomon’s metaphors.
Later Thursday: I’ve just come from the most marvelous 2-hour coffee session with dear Mary Ellen Chase who came to Cambridge last weekend with her brilliant classical scholar companion, Eleanor Shipley Duckett (both of them making fabulous money on new books and articles & radio broadcasts!) It was absolute heaven to tell her all about my year, my writing and to hear about my beloved Smith and all the people there; she strongly suggested that I would be asked back there to teach as soon as I graduate from Newnham; I would really like the chance to teach & get the experience of Smith, but could never imagine going back without a husband. Imagine living in that atmosphere of 2000 young attractive girls, without any social life of my own! I wouldn’t want “social life” either, as I’ve known it. I just want my home and my one man. I feel most honored at this prospect of their asking me, though, and if Ted and I need money, maybe he could get a job at Amherst for a year, and we could write and teach and have a home: some time: it’s a thing to think of. But I’m so pleased about his not going to Australia but teaching in Spain next year, and his apparent willingness to book passage back to America with me next June that I’m going to live the summer out before getting any more previous. If we got married (I don’t know just where or when right now, but probably sometime after I graduate next year) do you suppose it would be possible for us both to get part- or full-time summer jobs & a cottage down the Cape for the summer as Perry & Shirley and Marty & Mike did, so we could travel & write all over America the next year? This is just one of the little pots cooking in my head, but you might talk to the Cantors or anyone who has an “in” at the big hotels where we can make lots & lots of money: I’d waitress or work part-time & he could be a bartender or chauffeur with a millionaire family or something: do think about it! What a gala year with Warren graduating & me bringing my man home! Cross your fingers.
Much love,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 18 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Friday morning, May 18
Dearest mother . . .
It was so wonderful to get your last happy letter and to think that in less than a month I shall be welcoming you at Waterloo Station! Just let me know whether it is morning, noon, or night, and I’ll take my station in the waiting room with sandwiches & a camp stool! Our hotel, by the way, is Clifford’s Inn, Fleet Street, London. In case you want to know.
I know you’re fantastically busy, but have two small desperate requests: could you please possibly send my “Joy of Cooking” and lots more 3¢ stamps: I’m starting to send batches of Ted’s poems out to American magazines because I want the editors to be crying for him when we come to America next June; he has commissioned me his official agent and writes prolifically as shooting stars in August. I have great faith in his promise; we are coming into our era of richness, both of us, late maturing, reaching beginning ripeness after 25 & going to be fabulous old people! Ted, by the way, is Ted Hughes (Edward James Hughes, by the book). We are going to do pen & ink portraits of each other for the frontispieces of our first books. You should see Ted draw! He is like Arthur Rackham, only better! All sorts of gnarled witches, wolves frightened by ghosts, and will start some portraits of me! A combination of both witch and ghost, perhaps.
I forget whether I wrote you or someone else* about the Fulbright blast in London:* I took Ted in his ancient gray 8-year old suit & introduced him to the American Ambassador; then, after the Duke of Edinburgh spoke, he came down to chat, asking me where I was studying & what I was doing. When he asked Ted the same, Ted grinned & said he was “Chaperoning Sylvia.” “Ah,” the Duke smiled & sighed, “the idle rich.” So international protocol is taken care of.
Had a wonderful tea for Mary Ellen Chase and brilliant dear Miss Duckett (whose new book on King Arthur* is coming out in both England & America) in my room at Whitstead Wednesday with Jane Baltzell (the other beautiful blonde English major) and Isabel Murray, a charming girl studying Celtic and ancient literature & anthropology. I spent the whole day shopping for flowers, fruit and tea things: my room looked exquisite, and we had the most hysterical hour and a half! Miss Chase & Miss Duckett are like a comedy team, love a young audience, and so kept us in stitches with their tales of old Newnham days and students & professor characters. I could see everybody had a fine time and felt most joyous at being able to give love and hospitality to those two women who are largely responsible for my being here.
I am really longing for this summer in which to concentrate on writing; I feel such new power coming on me: I’ve been working up all kinds of things: poems, articles on everything from the women-situation at Cambridge (my short witty article on this came out verbatim today in the esoteric Isis magazine at Oxford: I’m going inter-collegiate! as this week’s Cambridge newsletter) and spring and summer fashions for Varsity (I’m doing a survey of the dress shops tomorrow morning). The New Yorker rejected my Bulganin article as too late which of course crushed me as it was a damn good, neat funny article. My biggest projects now are, of course, a book of poems which I want to send to the Yale Series of Younger Poets next winter, and my short story series which will be a novel: after next year on Varsity, where I’ll invent assignments to take me into every nook and cranny and mind in Cambridge, I should be able to write a perfect locale story, and the American-British contact is very salable. I was awfully pleased to get the Oxford assignment, as you may guess, for it is an honor to contribute, especially as representative of the women at Cambridge!
In your letter you didn’t say where and from when to when Warren will be in Austria. I am dying of curiosity, for I want Ted to meet him very much; I think those two will get along fine. Oh, mother, I only want you to have time to get to know Ted; in a few years the world will be marveling at us; we both have such strength & creativity and productive discipline (Ted’s poems are like controlled explosions of dynamite when he really writes full tilt) and practicality. We are capable of the most scrupulous and utter faithfulness in the world, demanding the most from each other, caring intensely for bringing each other to full capacity & production. We can rest & laze in the sun, or after a meal in a colossal peace, too. Our energy is something amazing. I only want you to come into the light of this and share our humor and love of life, which is almost impossible to convey the least speck of in words. We definitely want to get married in Wellesley next June after I graduate, and naturally I am just dying to talk over plans: I’ve already started pairing up bridesmaids & trying to figure how I can have both Libby* & Nancy* for flowergirls! By the way, if you think it might help grampy to fix on something special for him, tell him specially & very privately as a secret that I want him to know he should begin preparing for his granddaughter’s wedding where there will be at least one bottle of champagne and one small dish of caviar! I want it to be a town festival, small & intimate, of all those I love & who know what life means to me: Cantors, Crocketts, Prouty, neighbors, Marty, Patsy, everyone I love. I was so happy to hear about your plans to come to Italy in 1958; hope Ted & I might be working there that year! What fun to have you come visit us! We plan on 7 children, after each of us has published a book & traveled some, so the 7th child of that child might be a rare white witch! Cambridge is a lovely green eden, & to have an E
nglish spring & the dearest, most brilliant, strong tender man in the world is too much to keep alone: do come share with us!
Much much love,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 26 May 1956
TLS with envelope,
Indiana University
Saturday, May 26
Dearest mother . . .
May has turned chill and grey these last days, and I am writing from the midst of a wet, snuffly spring cold, but very happy. I’m enclosing the clippings from my latest article in Varsity on which I appeared as a cover-girl (!),* showing how hard-up they are! and my article inside, with more pictures. At least I look healthy, don’t I?
This article was the hardest I’ve ever done, and really took a lot out of me. I made arrangements with three store managers to choose clothes & come round with a photographer; of course, the details of price and description had to be perfectly accurate, and the bathing-suit store gave us all the help in the world and no trouble, because it is a big cheap department store, and the people simple and lovely. Met a charming woman salesmanager who had toured the U.S.A in a Shakespeare company and offered to send me an invitation to the Cambridge Arts & Sculpture exhibit* opening next week. Well, the bathing suit photos went fine, there, and I sauntered off with my very kind, slow Varsity photographer to posh Joshua Taylor’s,* where I have my only charge account, for snapshots in the most bouffant lovely cocktail dress ever.
I had spent a half-hour several days before sweet-talking the negative manager out of an old remembered Varsity feud two years old in which Varsity had printed a facetious article with pictures of their young model: “Who’d be caught dead wearing this?” etc. Well, I got him to agree to try to patch it up, and made the stupid mistake of assuming he’d made a mistake in the appointment which was on a Bank Holiday (all stores closed). Turned out he’d been there, and the day I came with photographer had left town with an emphatic “No, it’s all off.” I came back later, and he had come back, said No again and gone off. Well, I was crushed at my own carelessness (I always learn the hard way) and at the thought of all my mending work going down the drain, and tears started to my eyes.
I stood there red-eyed asking the buyer to at least read the dress-descriptions I’d written because it was probably the best free advertising they’d had yet: my words were so laudatory, that she whisked off to the store director, who came down and OKed the pictures over the absent manager’s head, and so, red-eyed and puffy faced, I put on the dress, and suddenly felt all right. Today I’m taking the paper with my personal apologies for wasting the manager’s time, to the store. As my photographer & I left, who should walk out but Mr. Joshua Taylor, owner of the store himself, to ask if we’d send over a Varsity cartoonist to discuss possible publicity ads. So all is once again sweetness & light due to my sheer stubbornness & refusal to give up.
The elegant store of formals also betrayed us, being busier than they thought and telling us it was impossible to take pictures or choose dresses on that day, as they had promised. In sheer desperation of ingenuity, I insisted on looking at dresses on my own for possible May Ball wear, as a customer (potential), which they couldn’t refuse, figuring I could at least write them up. While I was trying on the white one, the chastened store-owner, thinking better of it, came in to tell me to go out in the garden & take the pictures.
I was shot after all this arguing sweetly and quick thinking, just to get my story & pictures, having spent from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in personal relations. But I got the desired results, and the editor and shop people are happy, which is what I wanted. As the sweet photographer said: “I could have stood all day and argued, and they would have still said no.” I really am getting to be a determined newspaper woman. All this experience will be wonderful for my Cambridge novel. Varsity is my key to the town and all the people in it. Needless to say, Ted is very proud of me, especially the poems I’m doing now.* He just wants me to develop every talent I have, to do well in exams, and is very helpful and encouraging, and my best critic.
Most amazing is the way all my faculties are flourishing in my daily happiness & joy. I had the best philosophy supervision yesterday and neither Dr. Krook or I could believe it when the bell rang for her next pupil; she told me to come again this morning for an extra hour as we “hadn’t finished talking”, and I am just blazing with intellectual joy and keenness; she is very very pleased with my work, especially my last papers on Plato, and she is going to become my mentor in the poetic and philosophic realm just as Dr. Beuscher is in the personal and psychological. At last I have discovered a woman on the Cambridge faculty for whom I would sweat my brains out. This philosophic discipline will be invaluable for me, and I’m so happy I can continue it next year with her; she has become the most beautiful woman to me, is just alight, and we are temperamentally most compatible.
Ted is staying with his poet-friend,* E. Lucas Meyers (my next favorite poet after Ted) through May Ball week, and I generally meet him after lunch for an afternoon of study while he writes, and cook dinner here (Cambridge food in restaurants is probably the worst in the world) and talk and read aloud; our minds are just enraptured with words, ideas, languages. I took out my Rilke poems and my dear Märchen der Brüder Grimm* to read aloud my favorite German pieces to him (he doesn’t know German) and translated on the spot, getting very excited; I’ve definitely decided to take German all next year, concentrating on Rilke and Kafka, and some Thomas Mann. Ted likes hearing it, gets intrigued by my rough, impromptu translations. He is now applying for a job teaching English in Madrid, Spain, to earn us some money for next year. We spent a whole day out in the Whitstead gardens in the sun, me typing first copies and carbons of about 25 of his best poems & he editing, to send off to the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s & Poetry magazines. He has just never bothered to try to publish (outside the Cambridge magazines) and I can’t wait to see how he is received in America. He is going to be a brilliant poet; I know it with every critical fiber in me. His imagination is unbelievably fertile; our children will have such fun: last night while I peeled mushrooms to go with our dinner of sweetbreads, he read me aloud from a book of Celtic tales* we just bought, and from Dylan Thomas’ story-book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.” I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to share so completely my greatest loves of words and poems and fairy-tales and languages; so completely, also, the world of nature and birds and animals and plants. I shall be one of the few women poets in the world who is fully a rejoicing woman, not a bitter or frustrated or warped man-imitator, which ruins most of them in the end. I am a woman, and glad of it, and my songs will be of fertility of the earth and the people in it through waste, sorrow and death. I shall be a woman singer, and Ted and I shall make a fine life together. This year of work and discipline away from each other will probably be the hardest ever, but we can both be ascetics while we are working for something so magnificent as our whole creative lives; we plan to live for at least a hundred years.
You should see how Ted is changing under my love and cooking and daily care! Gone is the tortured black cruel look, the ruthless banging gestures; he is mellowing, growing rich and kind and dear and tender and caring of me as he would be of a delicate bird. I was so lucky to meet him at this age, this time; I have saved him to be the best man he can be. As he says himself, in two more years he would have grown to be a hard, knotty nut to crack, bitter & cynical, and destructive. Now he is responding, re-forming, even as I am. Both of us are old enough to have our own identities and self-knowledge quite firmly shaped, but, thank god, young enough to grow and change under the love and guidance of each other, so that we will become truly one person in the world’s eyes. I am hoping that you and I will have a good deal of time walking about and talking with him in London and in Paris (where his sister lives, whom I hope to meet). I want you to know him well, in all his talent and dearness; he will make us both really proud of him some day, not far off. Warren will be able to help me very subtl
y, I think, into weaning Ted into shopping for clothes for himself and giving him “man information” about America. Realize that my work is only begun, and if he seems to look rough, that is just the outside, which is shaping to match the lovely person he is growing to be within.
Much much love,
sivvy
TO Patricia O’Neil Pratson
Sunday 27 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme), Private owner
May 27th,
Dearest Pat . . .
You must think I’m the world’s worst correspondent! I’ve so loved your letters and the card from Smith, and all your news, most especially the marvelous new job teaching in NYC! And so near Louise and Eddie, too! Please do give them both my love when you see them: already, amazingly enough, I’m thinking with quite some joy of returning home next June. I thought for a while that I never would want to come back, because of the magnificent feeling of closeness here to all the peoples, politics and languages in the world, but the tide has turned, and I plan to come home for at least a year before returning to Europe.
Do let me know how Julie’s* applications to college turn out---there’s a lovely Bryn Mawr graduate on a Fulbright* in Whitstead this year and, although of course it’s not Smith, it sounds like the finest place! Warren, as mother has probably said, got his Experiment Fellowship, and I hope to hitchhike to see him in Europe this summer; we are, suddenly, an international family. I’ve spent much time this last month getting reservations for mother & me in London, Cambridge and Paris for the first two weeks of her visit. After the long hard dark months of my dear grammy’s sickness & death, I want to do all I can to heal mother & make her grow strong in this green eden of peace and beauty, taking care of all details so she only has to let herself be charioted about. I look so forward to her coming! Right now I am sitting in the green garden outside Whitstead trying to bake a wet spring cold out of my head, surrounded by poppies, fragrant lilacs and golden cascades of laburnum; I don’t know a more beautiful place in the world than this; the air is like honey, the calm and loveliness of birds, flowers and white cows incredible.