by Sylvia Plath
Love –
sivvy
TO Peter Davison
Sunday 30 September 1956
TLS (photocopy), Yale University
Whitstead
4 Barton Road
Cambridge, England
September 30, 1956
Dear Peter,
It was so good to hear from you today.* This letter may sound rather like an explosion of facts, projects and mere jottings, because I have been planning to write you to beg all kinds of advice which I need more with each day; I am sitting, as it were, on a stockpile of publishable material---stories, poems and incipient books---and would greatly appreciate your guidance at this point.
First, let me say that my year at Cambridge was a magnificent madhouse; it took me the whole year to hack out an idea of what I was doing there, and now I know, and the blessed Fulbright has renewed my grant for this year so I can get my Honours B.A. come this June. I spent last year in an incredible whirl---acting all the first term for the A.D.C., ravening through the pathetically pompous uncreative literary set & publishing in their Deltas, Chequers, etc., and, finally, becoming a feature and news reporter for Varsity and covering the gala wild caviar-and-vodka reception for Bulganin and unspellable Khrushchev at the Claridge with a Cambridge photographer, shaking hands with Bulganin, begging him to come to Cambridge, meeting countless mayors, Russians, Nigerian potentates, and tripping over Attlee and Eden. All of which I wrote up in a kind of “Talk of the Town” article which, alas, the New Yorker said was “too late” for them; Mollie Panter-Downes* did a long scoop on that one. Anyway, after a grim dark winter, I came into the Cambridge spring and started living from the center, and writing.
Paris is now my second home---I’ve lived there over two months in winter, spring and fall; Riviera and Matisse chapel at Christmas on a motor-scooter; Venice and Rome so briefly in spring I want to live a year in Italy after a long stay in America; Spanish coast in a native fishing village most of the summer, and the Bronte moors and Wuthering Heights (sat out in a frigid wuthering wind to do a pen drawing of the latter to illustrate travel article---the C. S. Monitor publishes drawings and articles of mine off and on) this past month. This year at Cambridge, I am working like a stoic; its like having a second chance to have cake after gorging on it last year---or something equivalent.
Anyway, I am spending the year reading like fury, and writing four hours a day: chief projects: getting a volume of poems together to submit to the Yale Younger Poets series this winter, in hope; and, writing a novel, very detailed, on an American girl in Cambridge from September to June, called, tentatively, “Hill of Leopards”; I always believe in titles. I’ve got a rich background for this novel, and am casing Cambridge this year, doing drawings and a notebook, and writing the rough novel in story-chapters which, if all goes well, I’ll try to sell as stories first. Then, next summer (I’m taking the first boat home after exams in June) I want to spend two months on Cape Cod trying to finish it. We’ll see. I’ll let you know how it’s getting on this year, and if it works out as I plan, perhaps you’d be willing to advise me about the first draft next summer. I’d like best to submit it for one of those big publishing house prizes---am I right in thinking the Atlantic Company runs one? I’m also writing short stories again---my favorite medium really, so far: will let you know the results of these, both serious (Mademoiselle and so forth) and funny (New Yorker kind of thing) and then the Ladies’ Home Journal sort. All I am doing this year is writing and studying and drawing; it is like being free of an albatross. So that’s about my projects---the novel, the Yale Poet’s contest, and stories.
My main need for advice concerns my discovery of the year. A new Review got published at Cambridge this year by a rebellious rough uncombed group of ballad singers, Celtic fanatics and refreshingly honest writers, only two of which were good, one of whom I looked up, in deepest admiration, on account of several poems which made Thom Gunn* look sick---his reputation is far over-rated, I think. Although, compared to the ruck of bad bad young British writers, he seems good in contrast. Well, anyway, this writer I found is named Ted Hughes, graduated from Cambridge in 1954 (Pembroke). Unpublished professionally. I became his agent, as it were, in America, and so far, he’s received enthusiastic acceptances of poems from Poetry and the Nation, and still has about thirty excellent poems out---the Atlantic, by the way, has had some of his poems for four months, in case you want to look them up, wherever they hide such things; I’ll be interested to know if Editor Weeks has seen them. The poems he’s had accepted so far came out in the August Poetry and about August 17 Nation. He is a brilliant writer and London and England are too small for him (I have never been so disappointed and disgusted by anything as the London literati, with their outposts in Oxford and Cambridge---writing in England is sick, sick, sick . . . Spender is a soft flabby over-rated conceited man; the young poets are incredibly malicious, vain, and with no sense of music, readable-ness, or, for that matter, deep honest meaning). I shall be glad to get home; bless America; bless the American editor. How I miss it all!
Well, Ted Hughes has written a delightful book of children’s fables, nine chapters, about 70 to 100 typed pages---I’m working on typing it out now, called “How the Donkey Became” and Other Fables---about how nine animals became---Whale, Elephant, Bee, Polar Bear, Owl, etc. I don’t want to rave about it, because I’d like you to see it and become a convert. Now where should I send this? I could look up children’s publishers in NYC and send it around, but the air mail postage of back-and-forth manuscripts will reduce me to eating bean sprout pilaus at the Taj Mahal if I’m not careful. Do you know any good children’s publishers that will do one proud regarding pay, illustrations, royalties etc.? I feel I’m beginning to need a lawyer. (I haven’t sent anything to that agent, because I want to get confidence by publishing a story first and then saying to him: “Look, how much money I can earn you.” I am very shy of committing myself before I’ve got a lot of manuscripts in back of me, and I’m just beginning to get there, writing every day in the mornings). If you’d be interested in seeing a copy of this children’s book, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll ferret out the names of some publishers and try my blind luck.
Next, Ted writes excellent adult fables---three of which are now at the New Yorker (the day either Ted or I get into that glittering rag will be the occasion of a colossal duck and orange sauce dinner with seven different wines for each course; Sorry, Please Try Us Again.) The best fable, I think, is a 20 page one, “O’Kelly’s Angel”---about an Irish guy who catches an angel and what happens: you know, the breaking in of the angelic order on this world; perfect simple flawless style of telling; sort of a cross between Hemingway, Thurber and Saki.* Then, a 10-page satire of TV “The Callum-Makers”, and one about the same length on the college and business life of a pig, born to an English crass society and industrial family, “Bartholomew Pygge, Esq.” I’m going on about these, so in case you have enough interest, I could send you copies. Ted wants to make up a book of these adult fables, and I hope many will find hospitable editors at the various magazines during the coming year. We’ve had readings of them, and the audience, British and American, is, gratifyingly, very happy with them.
Well, whew, there it is: I’m going fine, and the novel is my big project, about which I’d eventually like your kind advice, but it’ll be months yet, before it takes shape. The short stories are seething in my head, over the typewriter, like hot-cakes; or boiling oil. Do help me, if you can, about a place for Ted’s children’s book, or even, magazines for the adult fables. The satire on TV is excruciatingly funny.
Another thing: I’m desperate to know more about copyright laws: both Ted & I will want to publish our stories in book form, and, naturally want to keep the TV and movie rights (don’t laugh, it may come to this in a few years!) How to keep avaricious magazine editors from wanting to keep all rights and make a fortune? This is the most pressing question.
Thanks for listening to all this. I woul
d like to keep in close touch with you this coming year, until I’ll be home to fight in person with editors and copyrights next June. You really can be a terrific help, knowing about all the practical problems, as you do. I don’t want to muck about with professional agents until I’ve satisfied myself that our stuff can get in on its own; after that nightmare month as guest managing ed. of Mademoiselle, I realize only too clearly how disastrous it is to have too many contacts with hungry editors and not half enough manuscripts backing one up. This year should result in a huge pile.
I’m really eager to know the details about your job. Please tell how the change came about, and how all is with you. I heard the most enthusiastic reports about your acting in the Misanthrope, Alceste? and have the copy of Wilbur’s translation. Wish I could have seen it. Please tell me how all is. Met Nathaniel LaMar---dear, warm young Negro writer from Harvard, published twice by Atlantic,* at Pembroke this year. Fine fellow.
I’ll be bringing Ted Hughes home in June, too, to be married in Wellesley; we’re hoping to get teaching jobs in New England at twin colleges and go on writing like fury. When the time draws nigh (only nine months) I’d like very much to plan a kind of reunion meeting. You have no idea how hungry I am for home; British writing is dead; so are the magazines. I find myself no literary exile, but a staunch American girl. Such a fate.
My very best to you, with much gratitude for letting me blast off about all this. Hoping to hear from you soon . . . .
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
Mr. Peter Davison
Office of the Associate Editor
The Atlantic Monthly Press
8 Arlington Street
Boston 16, Massachusetts
U.S.A.
TO Ted Hughes
Monday 1 October 1956
TLS on RMS Queen Elizabeth
letterhead, family owned
Monday night about eight-thirty . . .
Dearest Teddy:
I am back. The gas fire wheezes and dehydrates my right side, the rain blowing in the open window hydrates the left; I am codeine-numb, dazed, and utterly blissfully insensible. The trip back was hell; I found by picking up my suitcase and letting a noble agonized expression pass immediately over my face, I needed no porter until Cambridge. I stared at the wet landscape en route; it was flat and gray-green. That was that. If there were buildings they were ugly.
Something wonderful and incredible has happened; I restrained myself and didn’t phone you; I restrained myself and put it in the second paragraph. I came back to several sad things: a sweetly pencilled New Yorker rejection of Ella Mason, etc., begging me, too, to try again; also, Mrs. Guinea, the charwoman, smashed to smithereens my lovely big imported pottery fruit platter; there was, however, a new green rug covering the Indian girl’s ink blots---Jean somebody, the dull Southafrican girl, just wasted the last half-hour, hemming and blithering about Her Summer Abroad. Hell. Also suffered Mrs. Milne and tea and much meandering about her doubts concerning going to Australia with the Nasser crisis, and how everybody she knows or is related to is sheep farmers in Australia, and how nice Indian girls are, they come in and out of her room all day and send her such lovely presents: gold-embroidered purple saris; Salome Milne. Brushed through the fifteen odd New Yorkers which had stacked up; will read slowly week by week: colossal amount of fables by Thurber* about Grizzly Bears and Gadgets, Oysters and Philosophers, etc.; haven’t had time or eyesight to read yet; also multitudes of poems by Theodore Roethke*---very lyric sentimental, all about fire, birds, tree and love o love. Also poems by John Malcolm Brinnin* (one huge long funny type fake poem; probably picked a word from a published poem here, there, and pasted them together$(), Adrienne Ceceile Rich,* getting richer but duller; Ogden Nash,* the lucre-monger. They’ll be begging for us yet. The latest serious poems are all about plants: orange milkweed,* St.-John’s wort,* and a Robert Graves* coy one about rose gardeners; also about birds: gulls,* peewits,* and very sweet detailed nature descriptions. Stories all begin either: “One of my greatest problems when young . . . ”* or “Eating bhindi ghust on a 19th century morocco carpet with Sahib X . . . ” A duck dinner with seven courses the day we get in . . .
AND NOW FOR THE GREAT NEWS: sit down, take a long sip of beer and bless Henry Rago.* POETRY has accepted SIX of my poems!!!!!!!!!!* Like we dreamed of. Didn’t I say the Fulbright would start the trigger? Strange, isn’t it, that the day I come back last June, it’s you; this time, it’s me. Tutored by your most mercenary self, I ran to count lines: Teddy, it should be about $76 (seventy-six dollars!) One line was only two words: “Looks up”: that’s 25 cents for looks, and 25 cents for up;
Lovely Henry Rago said: “We think these poems admirable, and we will be delighted to keep six of them for Poetry . . . . With all good wishes for your work.”
AND THEY BOUGHT ALL MY NEW POEMS (I can just hear Leftover Cravenson’s* pitying lisp: “I don’t think you’ll sell much of such poetry . . . I wish I could help you, poor wayward girl”)
They rejected three (“In ruck and quibble of court folk”,* The Glutton (alas) and The Shrike) BUT: they bought (bless, ah bless them): Wreath for a Bridal, Dream With Clam-Diggers, Two Sisters of Persephone, Strumpet Song, Metamorphosis (“Haunched like a faun he hooed”) AND Epitaph for Fire and Flower!!!
So there is a god afterall; and it isn’t, praise be, Stephen Spender. I am so happy. It is the consecration of my new writing, which properly, began with you and “Pursuit” and ramped on through spring and summer. “Epitaph for Fire and Flower” was begun on Benidorm beach;* bless it. Bless it all. You, if only you were here. I don’t know how I can keep still without exploding; I want to share everything with you---rain, rejections, wine, money, acceptances, reading. God. They will be flocking to the dock in hundreds when we arrive: children, begging you to autograph fables, Tv and movie producers; everybody. I am very numb and very insensible though. I have been unpacking, making huge piles for laundry, cleaners, rubbish, throwing away stacks of letters & scrap, during which I lacerated my thumb on a broken wine bottle; the cream crackers are soggy; the nescafe is a hard cake; the strawberry jam is rancid. I drank the last of the vinagery chilean burgundy and I love you. I will live in you and with every thought for you, however I must smile and be politic with my supervisor and the odd girls here, none of whom, thank heaven, are back yet. But I am all for you, and you are that world in which I walk. I am still eating your dear lovely sandwiches; I felt too lousy on the train to eat, except for the bananas like you said; so I am having hot milk and loving you over those sandwiches now. Thank heaven I will be seeing you before you go; it is about the only way I can assuage my present resentment of everybody that blocks my vision and jabbers on my hearing, because they aren’t you; you are the only face my eyes know how to see; you are the dearest love and crinkle-eyed smiler and darling Teddy. I miss you like hell, because somehow I can’t bear being with people who aren’t you and I just want to be alone now, and not be sociable; I won’t be; I must cut off all those little girls and boys who will want to wear down the spirals of my ear; I shall be so noncommital and cold it’s death.
Oh, I must get all this in: the camp bed is here, angled tautly and neurotically in one corner; and, amaze of amaze, your huge colossal leather coat is here, hanging blandly and god knows how in my closet. Your poems are here;* the Macaw, Bayonet Charge, Two Wise Generals, the new version of Hawk in Rain. Shall type all over many times. Am sending copies of pictures of us for your dear parents on condition none go to Australia. Please send that book-stack when you can; and any shots of us that came out well on the little film.
Tomorrow is a formidable looming day: to laundry, cleaners, bank, po, libe, shopping, everywhere everywhere Christmas tonight. But after that one seige of practicality, all shall be merely the typewriter or the hushed whisper of turning pages and batting eyelashes—
Please, now, tell your dear mother and dad I love them and am thinking of them, and thank them from the bottom of my heart
for making such a lovely comfortable warm home for me during my stay---how I miss the coal fires, the sherry and stories, the apple pies, the great green meadows stretching outside the windows, the black bandit-faced sheep and all the moors and valleys I tramped through. Give them both a kiss for me, and my dearest best love.