The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  I am dreaming so about the Cape next summer, & refrigerators, & pasteurized milk and drinkable tap water (we have to draw our drinking water from a well). Now that I have lived without icebox or variety of food or any convenience whatsoever, any place in America will seem like luxury to me. There is nowhere in the world like it, and I only hope that subtly I can convince Ted to love it as much as I do, so he will eventually want to come back there after our travels. But these next years shall probably be voyaging ones for us; he has a great longing to go to Australia to visit his brother, who is really the most important person in his family to him.

  Do let me know when you plan to announce my engagement. Perhaps early in October would be best, when I have been back in Cambridge & had time to write the Cantors, Marty Plumer, and a few other people personally. In order of preference, for bridesmaid, I’d like Pat O’Neil, Ruthie, or Marcia. If Uncle Frank gives me away & Warren is best man (I do hope dear Patsy can be the bridesmaid), all strain should be lifted, since everyone’s in the family. I look more forward to this wedding than I can say, for it is the beginning of our real life always together, with the burdens of the present lifted. I do hope we can get good teaching jobs at the same college! With Ted’s poems in the Nation & Poetry (I hope the New Yorker may accept O’Kelley’s Angel & his TV-satire, the Callum Makers), he should be helped a good deal. He is the most brilliant man I’ve ever met, and so unassuming about his knowledge that I’ll have to help his applications by making him put all his assets down. He literally knows shakespeare by heart & is shocked that I have read only 13 plays. He is going to help me on dating literature (part of the Cambridge exams) at his home, and is making me really think, & write deeply. I could never get to be such a good person without his help; he is educating me daily, setting me exercises of concentration & observation. This bull fight story is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written, with the action descriptions; it made me realize that his vision is really photographic, while mine is inclined to be an impressionist blur, which I am gradually clarifying by exercise & practice. We are completely happy together, & as long as we are together, I can bear anything in the world.

  Do write soon –

  much love –

  sivvy

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Friday 10 August 1956*

  TLS with envelope,

  Indiana University

  59 Tomas Ortunio

  Provincia de Alicante

  SPAIN

  Dearest of mothers . . .

  What a life you are leading! Each new postcard and letter sounds like a fairytale. I do hope this reaches you before you sail: did I tell you a letter from Mrs. Prouty came for you in charge of me? The addresses covered the envelope & it was just routine, so I didn’t send it on. About the money: both Ted & I agree you shouldn’t have taken it from your funds to send. We being frugal and managing, now that we’ve decided to leave Spain for good when we go to meet Warren in Paris, and then spend a month at Ted’s home in Yorkshire so I can meet all his mad aunts and crooked uncles (he does actually have one millionaire uncle! with a mad daughter and hypochondriac wife*---probably will leave us thousands just as Walt Disney buys Ted’s animal fables and I sell my novel to the movies!) Just finished a 2nd 25-page story, very funny in a way, about “That Widow Mangada”,* the queer witchy woman whom we lived with for our first wild week in Benidorm. I think you’d like it. I’m at last coming into my own, writing about 5 hours daily. We work perfectly together. My “Black Bull” story* while the most difficult description I’ve ever done, was stilted & awkward compared to the fast-moving incidents of this last. Am now beginning one called “The Fabulous Roommate”,* a kind of Double story about Nancy Hunter. Ted is a master at thinking up plots, my hardest task, and a perfect critic. O’Kelley is coming on magnificently and Ted reads me Shakespeare aloud while I prepare meals so I won’t waste any time.

  He is an absolute angel. I have never been so happy in my life. Whatever uncertainty we have about jobs & where money will come from in the immediate future, we are golden with work & love; our lives just blend perfectly. I never felt so at ease with anyone in my life; both of us are so fluent with writing and ideas, and criticize each other’s output every day, stimulating each other and exchanging ideas. We are getting healthy and rested at last.

  This summer, full of tests, new situations, money problems, uprootings, searchings for homes, has certainly been a fine proof of our ability to grow and learn together. We are both eager and pliable enough to help each other grow to a better, richer, more disciplined, self-demanding person. Ted is so tender and loving, I find I can express my enthusiasm and affection fully for the first time in years and years--since I was a little girl. All my fancies and whimsical imaginings and fairy-tale thoughts are awakened by his marvelous mind. Every morning he tells me the wonderful brilliant dreams he has about animals and Blake and all sorts of vivid queer plots. It is like living in a fairy-tale with the dearest, kindest, handsomest, most lovable man in the world.

  I’m rambling on so I haven’t said what I started to: Ted and I don’t want to touch the $100 you so dearly sent. We can manage without, I think. Shall keep it by us till Paris, just in case. But then, wish to give it to Warren (do I have to cash & sign it) for you to put toward our wedding reception next year. My big ambition in the next year is to sell an $850 story to the women’s magazines to pay for our Cape cottage for the summer. I’ve got great ideas for this “Hypnotizing Husband” story, but have to wait till I’m back at the Cambridge library to read up on it.

  Hope you are well & happy. What a lovely family we are now! All of us opening wide new horizons, and you right up with us! I can’t wait to cook in our little home kitchen again, make chicken sandwiches for picnics on Nauset Beach, revisit our dear neighbors & have everybody meet Ted. We look so forward to our second wedding. Life should be easier next summer, if we can manage good jobs. I really should apply to at least 5 or 6 colleges. We’d like a New England country college if possible; the big Women’s colleges take both men & women. Smith of course would be ideal, but I don’t know if they’d take Ted in English unless--and this would help--he published more poems & a story or two. That would take the place of degrees for a start. Tell me more about such pairs as Tufts, Smith-Amherst, Radcliffe-Harvard, or whatever else you can think of. The State & City colleges probably only take Teacher’s certificate people.

  Every now and then I have to pinch myself to make sure my life has catapulted into such joy and good fortune; I was not meant to live for myself alone and would have turned sour and selfish if I’d tried to be a “career woman”, with even my career going acid in my mouth. Now I can have my cake and eat it: my writing will prosper in my full love (I’m not a Sara-Teasdale type unhappy writer---I’m only able to write when I’m living a rich, full life & have an objective sense of humor) and I have the best husband in the world: we are so close, with our dearest work: like, I imagine, the Beuschers, or Perry & Shirley---there is nothing quite like sharing the same life-work. Our children will really be lucky: they’ll be bred on original fables!

  If one has courage and conviction and thinks and acts straight, all comes. I feel this daily in my daring and difficult conviction that I would love Ted, whatever fears and doubts I had. By boldness and faith, I have discovered the dearest tender person who wanted to get out of the destructive black whirlwind he was warping in; I have worked hard & given my all to bring him to his proper self, and he has given me that rare lovely ability to love beyond myself, and care for him more than myself, and want to make myself fine and creative, for his sake. I feel freed for the first time. What a blessing this Fulbright has brought; I’m sure there was no other man in the world but Ted for me; physically strong and vital and dynamic; whimsical, humorous, creative, loving, brilliant, practical. Everything. My address from August 17th on – The Beacon, Heptonstall Slack, Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire ENG.

  xxx

  Sivvy

  TO Elinor Friedma
n Klein

  Friday 10 August 1956

  TLS, Smith College

  Friday, August 10

  Dear wandering one . . .

  Please, please get this. Your letter caught up with me in my vine-grown white stucco villa from whose window (I am now sitting at) I see a blue corner of the Mediterranean. I hang my laundry on a fig tree in the back yard; steal almonds from the groves with Ted at night; swim, cook on a fickle one-ring petrol burner, and write and write. We are happy as hell, writing stories, poems, books, fables. Much has occurred. Madrid, bullfights, wild mad Spanish widows, movings. Did I tell you Ted’s had two poems accepted: by Poetry (Chicago) and the blessed Nation (at least we share one magazine). Our projects are legendary.

  I hardly can speak of my frustration about the London mess; I had a similar time in Paris trying to get together with the-old-man-of-the-sea Gordon last spring. The American Express is a blackguard ring of foreign agents designing to undermine & overthrow the individual American morale. They use airmail letters for toilet paper, its so soft, so gentle.

  I MUST SEE YOU: please please come to Paris to see us. You can, you will, you must. Ted is meeting my brother, I’m meeting Ted’s sister, there from AUGUST 23rd to August 28th, no doubt at the HOTEL DES DEUX CONTINENTS: 25 Rue Jacob, Paris 6e. Left Bank, that is. Please write me quick anytime before August 17th here at:

  E. J. Hughes

  59 Tomas Ortunio

  Benidorm

  Provincia de Alicante

  SPAIN

  or have a letter waiting for us at the Hotel des Deux Continents (with our arrival date: August 23rd on it) telling when if, how where, etc. you can meet us in Paris. Plane from Athens, mayhap? It’s right on your way. Please, please. Have you ever met my young blond brother? He’s just written some mathematical thesis on the Russian vowels and is quite a dear. He’s been living in Austria on an Experiment in International Living fellowship this summer and will be fresh from Venice.

  All will be manifest when you come. Please come. After our 6 day sojourn in Paris, I go with Ted to Yorkshire for a month to meet his parents and clan of mad aunts and crooked uncles. We’re having a wedding in Wellesley next June. All is like some miracle. We write like mad all morning, both of us in this immense room with hundreds of mahogany chairs around a huge dark polished table. Black goats keep jangling by, and bread ladies, and donkey taxis to the railway station. You are expected to kill your own rabbits at the peasant market. I love you and want to see you and Have you meet my brilliant writer man. COME TO PARIS –

  much love –

  sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Mon.–Sat. 20–25 August 1956

  TLS, Indiana University

  59 Tomas Ortunio

  Benidorm

  Provincia de Alicante

  Spain

  August 20: Monday

  Dearest of mothers . . .

  Between the heading and this sentence about five days have passed: it is now Saturday the 25th and Warren is sitting on our bed reading your letter while Ted is at the bowl scrubbing the last dirt out of his shirt, which only his hands are strong enough to get clean. Our trip up was really wearying, but much of it fun: I enjoyed the last week in Benidorm more than any yet, as if I were just coming awake to the town, and went about with Ted doing detailed pen-and-ink sketches while he sat at my side and read, wrote or just meditated. He loves to go with me while I sketch and is very pleased with my drawings and sudden return to sketching: wait till you see these few of Benidorm: the best I’ve ever done in my life, very heavy stylized shading and lines: very difficult subjects too: the peasant market (the peasants crowded around like curious children, and one little man who wanted me to get his stand in too, hung a wreath of garlic over it artistically so I would draw that); a composition of three sardine boats on the bay side, with their elaborate lights; and a good one of the cliff-headland with the houses over the sea.* I’m going to write an article for them and send them to the Monitor; I feel I’m really developing a kind of primitive style of my own which I am very fond of. Wait till you see; the Cambridge sketch was nothing compared to these. Ted wants me to do more and more.

  I made a huge picnic the night we left: hard-boiled eggs, tuna and onion sandwiches, tomato and cheese, chocolate and grapes: the first day was much enlivened by continual munching of little snacks while on the bus from Benidorm to Valencia, where we found a little park to eat lunch and took the train to Barcelona where we spent a gruelling night at a filthy fly-ridden hotel, the only one, it appears within a mile of the station. Wednesday morning in Barcelona was lovely: I made a picnic in the park on a bench, mixing tuna and mayonnaise and onions in bits in their jars and stuffing a huge loaf of bread; we spent a marvelous morning at the outdoor zoo staring at a blue-nosed, black-looking mandrils, hundreds of curly little yellow monkeys small as humming birds; porcupines, a playful otter, crocodiles and baby lions and eagles; then the first really fine dinner at an elaborate empty inn near a cascade full of swans: steak and wine and icecream, red meat at last.

  The trip to Paris was exhausting, leaving at 3 in the afternoon and getting in at nine the next morning; we were stiff and cramped, but revived over breakfast on the train, and had a delightful gray morning sitting by the early Seine watching the fishermen on the bank and the women on the barges hanging out washing; such a joy to have subtle gray weather after the blank blazing sun; life is so much heightened by contrasts; I am actually looking extremely forward to going up to Ted’s wuthering-heights home next week; for all my love of the blazing sun, there is a lack of intellectual stimulus in countries as hot as spain.

  Warren arrived early yesterday morning, and we fed him breakfast and made him take a nap all afternoon. Had a nice supper and saw two excellent movies: an hysterical old Harold Lloyd film and Eisenstein’s magnificent 1925 version in Russian of the Battleship Potemkin,* which struck us all with tremendous power; took a brief walk in the rain and talked about it. Had not the least trouble in writing ahead and reserving rooms at the Hotel des Deux continents for the three of us, although they are more expensive at the height of the tourist season. Paris is not French Paris; the only language you hear is English, and I am glad that Ted and I can give Warren the atmosphere as we know it, not as the tourists find it. Hope we can live here a year some day (but not in July and August), because of the continuous fine movies and plays and art exhibits; I really love this city above any I’ve ever been in; it is dear and graceful and elegant and what one makes it. I could never live in London or New York or Madrid, or even Rome, but here, yes.

  Now we are all going to get our reservations at the American express; I love being with my two favorite men. Warren looks handsome and fine, and told us yesterday at lunch about his thesis paper and language work, most fascinating, a juncture of several fields, and an intriguing possibility of pioneer work; see that he gets his Fulbright & other applications off like clockwork in October, emphasizes his extra-work: from polio ward to mental hospital, stresses his eventual hope to help people. He should get a fellowship to study psychology in a German university, none finer; make him write them about their programs, find names of special men; he could combine math, language and psychology degree, and have rich life. Hope your trip back was not full of mal de mer; rest before school. We all love you dearly.

  Much love,

  sivvy

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Sunday 2 September 1956

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  September 2, 1956

  Sunday morning

  Dearest mother . . .

  I wish you could see your daughter now, a veritable convert to the Brontë clan, in warm woolen sweaters, slacks, knee socks, with a steaming mug of coffee, sitting upstairs in Ted’s room looking out of three huge windows over an incredible wild green landscape of bare hills, crisscrossed by innumerable black stone walls like a spider’s web, in which gray woolly sheep graze, and chickens and dappled
brown-and-white cows; a wicked north wind is whipping a blowing rain against the little house and coal fires are glowing; this is the most magnificent landscape in the world: incredible hills, bare grass and vivid green, with amazing deep creviced valleys, feathered with trees, at the bottom of which clear peat-flavored streams run. Climbing along the ridges of the hills, one has an airplane view of the towns in the valleys; up here, it is like sitting on top of the world, and in the distance the purple moors curve away; I have never been so happy in my life; it is wild and lonely and a perfect place to work and read. I am basically, I think, a nature-loving recluse. Ted and I are at last “home.” And what a trip to get here!

  We saw Warren off on the train to Rotterdam early on the rainy morning of the 28th, Ted had caught a miserable cold, and we were tired and numb as we took the boat train that evening for the night crossing; how glad I am you didn’t take the channel boat! Both of us were deadly sick, vomiting by turns on the freezing deck and sharing a basin, in utter misery; a whole gruelling day’s trip ahead, lugging suitcase & sacks and changing busses, and finally, after all that, peace.

  Ted’s parents are dear, simple Yorkshire folk, and I love them both; we live upstairs in Ted’s old room, which I have for my workroom, and he writes in the parlor downstairs; his father, a white-haired, spare, wiry fellow, has a little tobbaconist’s shop downtown, and his mother is plumpish, humorous, with marvelous funny tales of neighbors and a vivid way of describing things; she has a tiny kitchen, and I cook for Ted & me, and she loves pottering about making us starchy little pottages and meat pies. (I’ll be so happy to have an American kitchen at last, though, with orange juice and egg beater and all my lovely supplies for light cookies and cakes!) I think they both like me, and seem to find me more congenial than Gerald’s wife who visited them once, a blonde flighty glamor girl from Australia, evidently very giddy and always wanting to go to parties and dances. I’ve borrowed a duffle coat and knee boots from Ted’s cousin Vicky,* a quiet, attractive girl who has won a two-year art scholarship, and hike around the country comfortably. Ted’s marvelous millionaire Uncle Walt (married to a hypochondriac hag, with two sons dead, one an idiot, and only an idiot daughter left) took us over to Wuthering Heights Friday in his car. He is a powerful heavy man with a terrific sense of dramatic humor, and we got along fine. We had a picnic in a field of purple heather, and the sun, by a miracle, was out among white luminous clouds in a blue sky; there is no way to Wuthering Heights but for several miles by foot over the moors: how can I tell you how wonderful it is: imagine yourself on top of the world, with all the purplish hills curving away, and gray sheep grazing, with horns curling and black demonic faces and yellow eyes, like ancient druids; black walls of stone, clear streams from which we drank; and at last, a lonely, deserted black stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy edge of a hill. I began a sketch of the sagging roof and stone walls; will hike back the first nice day to finish. Last night Ted and I hiked out at sunset to stalk rabbits in a fairy-tale wood falling almost perpendicularly to a river valley below; I swung over cascading brooks on tree-branches, stared at the gold sky and clear light, stopped in a farm to pet three black new-born kittens, admired cows & chickens; Ted, a dead-eye marksman shot a beautiful silken rabbit, but it was a doe with children, and I didn’t have the heart to take it home to make a stew of it. You should see Ted. He is the handsomest man in the world; if possible, we are a happy Heathcliffe and Cathy! Striding about in the woods and over the moors. Please, if the pictures come out, send two copies, no matter what the expense; I’d love Mrs. Hughes sr. to have some. Best news came yesterday morning: guess what, at last! A marvelous letter* and check for $50 from Editor Weeks of the Atlantic for my poem “Pursuit”* which I sent you. And such a letter. I must quote: “We all think your poem “Pursuit” a fine and handsome thing and look forward to the opportunity of publishing it on a page by itself in the Atlantic. Could you tell me about another poem of yours, not in this sheaf, “Two lovers and a beachcomber by the real sea,” a copy of which was shown me by a mutual friend? It is really quite striking.” And more about Cambridge. Too bad Mlle has already published the latter poem; but I was delirious with joy at such a lovely letter; I’ve been badly needing some acceptance this year, and this will keep me going for another year; keep an eye out for the issue, and buy up lots of copies: a whole page to myself! Like Dylan Thomas, and for the same price! It is the first poem I wrote after meeting Ted, and his “Bawdry Embraced” in Poetry was dedicated to me, so our future should be great; we are so happy working and planning together and I have never loved anybody so much in my life. I adore you and my love to Warren. Do write and say you survived your crossing.