The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  Our funds will just cover Spain, and we hope to persuade Warren to meet us in Paris: all plans to cross England or go to Vienna are out, and we will be lucky if we make it to Paris to see Warrie at the end of August. Our hotel here treats us beautifully, and we have found a marvelous cheap restaurant* where we can get a full meal of tender Chateaubriand steak, vegetables, bread and wine for only about 250 francs apiece (less than a dollar!) and so can eat there daily. Do try to get your travel agent to plan that week in England for you; I am crushed that I won’t be able to see you off, for I so loved being with you those last days in Paris. But in less than a year, I shall be home.

  You have no idea how forward I look to that cottage on Cape Cod! To have a laundromat handy to keep clothes clean (which will be impossible in lukewarm water and facesoap this summer) and to have an icechest with food on hand! Such a dream. I’d like any advice you can give me early next fall about applying for jobs for both of us. Should he write to say “my wife and I”, or me saying “My husband”, or both separately? I suppose I should write “my-husband-to-be”, technically! How I long to settle in Spain next week with our blessed Olivetti and write uninterrupted for a month! I am really weary of making practical travel arrangements and will be glad when we find a place down there. I’ll try to write again from Madrid, where we’ll stop to reconnoiter before heading to the southern coast; have written Mrs. Prouty about being engaged & unable to make England.

  Am very very happy with my wonderful husband,

  much love,

  sivvy

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Saturday 7 July 1956

  TLS with envelope,

  Indiana University

  Madrid

  July 7, 1956

  Dearest of mothers!

  If only you could see me now, sitting in haltar and shorts seven stories high above the modern tooting city of Madrid on our large private balcony with gay blue-and-yellow tiles on floor and wall-shelves, pots of geranium and ivy, and across, baroque towers and a blazing blue sky even now, going on eight p.m. Ted is inside writing on another fable and I just finished a detailed design sketch of my sky-view. Both of us, although still tired from our gruelling 24-hour train trip which got us here at 9 p.m. last night, are just beginning to feel deeply what an incredibly rich, creative life is opening up before us.

  We are staying here till next tuesday to gather forces, enjoy the city: our hotel was recommended by the railway station, and we’ve had a much easier time getting around and discovering places and making practical arrangements than in either London or Paris! Our hotel-room which is spacious, comfortable, cool, with a high cross-ventilated breeze, costs roughly $2.75 a night, the most we’ve ever paid, but we were so exhausted from our 40-hour stretch of Paris business and the train ride that we felt this three-day interim deserved comfort. For this price we have a divine balcony, where I lie and tan in the early morning sun, and type in the cool shade of the afternoon; a private bathroom complete with tub, shower, etc. Dear Ted has never been in a place with a shower before (the last bath he took being in a public hole in London, the day of our wedding!) He is like an excited small boy about it, just reveling in a daily shower, yipping like Frankie used to.

  Our train trip was fantastic. The first half of it (Paris to Bordeaux and the French border) was definitely the worst: we were, at night, just as we were ready to sleep, sitting straight up in a crowded compartment of 8. Worst of all, the 4 people on one side got into one of those interminable impassioned conversations (three old ladies and an old man) which was fun to watch and listen to at first, in which they treated their case histories of horrible deaths, the disquieting troubles of life after the happy days of the twenties, and their favorite beverages with equal passion and opinionated vehemence. However, about one in the morning, and I thought I’d scream. I was glad when the smutty gray dawn came, and we disembarked at the border for an hour of going through customs and a saving mug of coffee on the Spanish side. Ted and I felt increasingly grubby; the wash’n’dry cloths helped, and the coffee really sustained us.

  The change of atmosphere in the Spanish 3rd-class train was incredible and very wonderful. The French people have a calculating, mean, intellectual critcalness about them which I really do not care for; the Italians are too soft and plump and childlike, with an even slimier commercial bent. But the Spaniards! They are utterly magnificent. I have never been treated so marvelously in my life.

  Ted and I looked pretty dirty, with his rucksack and my shopping bag into which I’d packed, in Paris, milk, butter, bread (mile-long loaves), cheese, peaches and cherries, according to the train fashion, which is to eat continually from large bottomless sacks. Well, Ted accidentally put the bottle of milk on top of the butter during one snack, and the butter squushed and went all over everything. Then, by the time we got on the Italian train, the milk had curdled and it spilt all over the floor as we went over some bumps. Well, we learned. And the bread and cheese and fruit tasted marvelous.

  As I was saying, on the Spanish train, we had a compartment with two dear Spanish soldiers, rifle-men, tremendously fierce looking, with big guns, queer black hats with a back-flap, and many bullet pockets. They began to talk to us immediately, and Ted and I made do with his minute Spanish-English dictionary which soon became the pet article of the compartment, everyone looking through the dictionary for the spanish word they wanted to convey, finding it, and then showing it to us and doing the rest with their hands and inflection. We both actually felt perfect rapport with them all. There were the two soldiers, a handsome gay dandy with a moustache, a dark tan peasant, a charming young boy, and a very helpful and friendly working-man. The first thing that knit us together was that the workman had brought a leather wine-flask from which one squirts a jet of wine into the mouth. Well, this was passed around and around during the 12-hour train trip to Madrid, a different man getting out at each station to refill it. The jet only squirted about a mouthful, so it takes a long time to make up the glass. The sharing, utterly heartfelt and unselfconscious, delighted me. Ted and I had some salami, tomato and wine from the rest, and divided up our immense store of bread and cheese and cherries among them. Everybody took a piece of everything, and we looked up words, discussed where Ted and I thought we might go to live in South spain, discussed clothes, everything.

  The trip felt twice as short as the night ride through Paris. You should have seen me learning to use the wine-flask! I was the Little Buttercup of the car, and everybody went into hysterics when I’d squint my eyes and get wine up my nose or something. Eventually I learned just how to tilt the flask, point back down into the throat swallow while drinking and spraying, and tip and stop without spilling.

  It is so wonderful that wherever Ted and I go people seem to love us. We are fantastically matched; both of us need the same amount of sleep and food and time for writing; both are inner-directed, almost anti-social in that we don’t like functional parties and are happiest with simple, unpretentious working people, who adopt us immediately. Before we left Paris, we discovered a tiny, ugly cheap restaurant where negroes & workpeople flocked for platters of good simple food. We went there daily for the specialty of the house: a thick, tender, rare Chateaubriand steak smothered in parsley butter, plenty of bread to sop up sauce, a pile of delicious string beans, red wine and Yoghurt, the whole meal mounting up to about $1.60 for the two of us!!! Can you imagine. Both of us would have been perfectly happy to have gone on eating the same dish all day for the summer.

  Anyway, I have never felt so native to a country as I do to Spain. First of all, the colors we saw from the train window all the way down were brighter than I thought possible in the world: blazing yellow, tan and light green fields under a blue-white sky, green-black pine trees, white adobe houses with orange tile roofs, and all, bless it, utterly agricultural or sheep and bull country. We saw endless miles of grass pampas on which grazed flocks of black and white sheep, black bulls, spotted cows, guarded by shepherds with crooks &
sheep dogs, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Then after miles of rocky outcropping hills and resin-pines, a pink walled village would spring up, with burros circling wells to draw water, storks nesting on the church steeple, chickens and children riding donkey carts. Sparsely populated and ruggedly, vividly beautiful. Everything here seems so clean, compared to Italy: all is white, and violent colors. Now, at 9 p.m. it is still light enough to type outside, perfectly comfortable in haltar and shorts.

  Perhaps what is most “mine” about the climate is the blessed dry heat. One simply doesn’t sweat at all; there is no sense of that heavy wet oppression that comes on our “dog-days” at home. Clean dry hot air strikes one, invigorating, even though I can well understand the siesta habit where everything is closed from 1 to 4. It is impossible to hurry. Best of all, I have a light clear head that I never knew was possible. I never knew what a load of weight I was carrying in my sinuses! For the first time in my life I feel clear-headed, vigorous and energetic in my own fashion: bright sun, dry heat, good cheap food (Ted and I bought delicious nectarines & a small watermelon to eat at home today). Laundry, hair, everything is bone dry after about 15 minutes!* I am utterly delighted at the thought of coming back here for two 5-week periods during the year. Plan to learn Spanish cold this summer & study it on my own at Cambridge. It is so much faster here, in the center of Spain, where everyone is only too eager to teach us words and pronunciation.

  We plan to go to a bullfight tomorrow night, buy Ted some light summer jerseys and a summer suit Monday (it was only after today and the blazing dry heat that I persuaded him he needed a light-weight suit--the dear stubborn boy had planned to wear his heavy winter sweater or heavy black corduroy jacket all summer!) His almost blind unwillingness to spend money for necessities to health (like the teeth) or comfort (like proper outfits for summer & winter climates) is a carry-over from his impoverished years in London, his sight of a spendthrift spoilt sister (which makes it an impossibility, in his eyes, to ask for money from home, which she, older as she is, does successfully & selfishly very often). I hope that slowly I’ll be able to reecucate him to be more generous to himself, although I am very glad he is economical. I’m going to try to slip off alone Monday to get him a tie or a toilet kit for his birthday (which is August 17, in case you’d like to send him a card). We plan to take a day bus-trip to get to the large city of Alicante, down from Valencia on the coast, Tuesday, rent a small cottage, furnished (the man at the American Express today was very encouraging) in which I hope to cook, very near the beach. Spain is utter heaven.

  Our best idea came today, when I asked Ted if he wouldn’t rather teach Spanish at an American university than English, it being a more specialized subject, and a year teaching in Madrid would be excellent recommendation. He would much rather teach a language than English lit. since he doesn’t like the false, narrow critical approach to English lit. (having a very original mind and opinions himself, being really too big and demanding for a freshman English course, I think, which I am not). We’d probably have more chance of being appointed together then, and language is really easier to teach than English lit., it being more definite and less demanding on time. He also hopes to make a sideline of translating and selling, maybe anthologizing, Spanish poetry. We’d also like to spend some time in South America, maybe in the summer following our year teaching in New England. By then, both of us should be almost bilingual with Spanish and get on fine. With Ted and me together, all is possible. We have such fun, and both agree that we don’t feel we’re living with “another” person, but only the perfect male and female counterparts of our own selves, very whole and happy.

  We both send best love to you, hoping your trip is as wonderful as it sounded from the first card. Will be writing toward the end of the week with our permanent address.

  Much much love, your own

  sivvy*

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Sunday 8 July 1956*

  ALS (picture postcard),

  Indiana University

 

  EL TORO SALTA LA BARRERA.

  Dearest mother –

  at last I have found my native country – dry blazing heat – violent colors – strong dear wonderful people – have never felt so well or been so happy – on train ride saw only vivid yellow pampas, sheep, storks, burros – it is like a primitive unspoilt dreamland.

  xxx

  sivvy*

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Saturday 14 July 1956

  TLS with envelope,

  Indiana University

  Write us till Sept. 20 c/o Enriqueta Luhoz Ortiz

  Avenida de Alcoy, Benidorm, Province of Alicante Spain

  Saturday morning

  July 14th

  Dearest, dearest mother!

  At last we have found our place, our home, after a hectic month of living out of suitcases and searching for cheap restaurants. You would hardly believe it if you saw where I am sitting now! What has happened in the last two days is like a fairy-tale, and I can hardly believe myself that our summer dwelling has surpassed my wildest, most exotic dreams. I feel that our real honeymoon has at last begun, with our plan for simple living, writing and studying.

  First, let me say that we left Madrid Tuesday morning on an 8 hour bus trip through dry, deserty Spanish country, relieved by olive trees, vineyards and blazing yellow wheat fields, eating from a watermelon I’d brought, drinking cold beer at the little stops, staring at the vivid reddish-purple earth, the workers taking siestas in the shade of hay wains. Alicante, our big stop-off from which we planned to find our place, was a terrible honky-tonk port, and we spent a nightmarish two nights there, utterly exhausted, miserable, disgusted by the cheap resort blare, worse than any Coney Island. The first day, we asked for information of little villas in near-by small towns, and were given dubious looks & talk about the height of the season. Well, we just managed to board a bus going to Benidorm, supposed to have a good beach, an hour’s ride off, to walk and look about in person. It was then our luck started.

  As soon as I saw the tiny village ahead, after an hour of driving through the red sand desert hills, dusty olive orchards & scrub grass that is so typical around here, and saw the blaze of blue sea, clean curve of beach, immaculate white houses and streets, like a small sparkling dream town, I felt instinctively with Ted that this was our place. On the bus-ride we’d become more and more skeptical about the feasibility of getting a furnished house, with linens, etc. & cooking utensils and had almost regretfully decided a hotel room would be more likely a place for good plumbing, light, air etc., when a little lively black-eyed woman on the bus seat in front of us turned to ask if we understood French. Whereupon she informed us that she had a lovely house on the sea-front with a garden, and big kitchen, where she was letting rooms for the summer. It sounded almost too good to be true, combining the advantages of a private house which we couldn’t afford with the comfort of a hotel.

  Well, she led us through the bright white streets where there were burro carts, open market with fresh fruit and vegetables, gay shops, a strange mixture of clean colorful poverty with large pastel hotels, everything apparently just finished being built before we came, utterly new, with the modern styles blending with the simple native architecture. Very strange, because while Benidorm is just being discovered by tourists, except for the hotels, it is utterly uncommercial, built along a mile curve of perfect beach, with glassy clear waves breaking on shore, a large rock island out in the bay, and the most incredible azure sea, prussian blue toward the horizon and brilliant aqua nearer shore.

  Her house was a large brown café-au-lait-colored stucco closer to the sea than grammy’s place in Winthrop, with a palm and a pine tree growing in the front yard, a back and side garden full of red geraniums, white daisies, roses, a fig tree and tree with bright red flowers, with a backdrop of purple mountainous hills, incredibly lovely. She also had a huge cool kitchen with all the cooking utensils one could wish. O
f the four rooms for rent upstairs, Ted and I fell in love utterly with the one we are living in now: a small pink-washed room just big enough for two new maple beds which we pushed together facing the sea, a little dressing shelf & mirror, & a half-bookcase, half-wardrobe. The real glory, though, are the large French window-doors opening onto our balcony-terrace! That’s where I’m sitting now, drying my newly washed hair, facing the whole expanse of blazing blue Mediterranean, the palmtree rustling in the continuous salt sea-breeze, the sun tanning me at last, freshly laundered clothes, flapping dry over the deck-chair beside me. Ted is in the inner room on the bed studying Spanish, utterly happy. Our life is incredibly wonderful, and we will stay here solidly till September 29th, when we’ll head back to leave me in Cambridge. There is so much to tell about our wonderful place here!