The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  Sing praise for statuary:

  For those anchored attitudes

  And staunch stone eyes that look*

  Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot

  At some steadfast mark

  Beyond the inconstant green

  Gallop and flick of light

  In this precarious park

  Where vivid children twirl

  Like colored tops through time

  Nor stop to understand

  How all their play is touch-and-go:

  But, Go! they cry, and the swing

  Arcs up to the tall tree tip;

  Go! and the merry-go-round

  Hauls them round with it.

  And I, like the children, caught

  In the mortal active verb,

  Let break an elegiac tear

  For each fierce, flaring game

  Of quick child, leaf and cloud,

  While on this same fugue, unmoved,

  Those stonier eyes stare*

  Safe-socketed in rock.

  The other poem’s for you and probably, like most plaints, keepable only because it is done in love; my darling darling Teddy. Tell me how soon I may see you –

  your own wife

  sylvia

  TO Ted Hughes

  Saturday 6 October 1956

  TLS, family owned

  saturday morning, oct. 6

  dearest darling teddy . . .

  two lovely letters this morning and that’s that, from you,* from the one who easily sounds like our best angel, peter davison.* now don’t get too optimistic (I say this, for it’s hard for me not to, and one of us must keep that icy head if all things we handle are fire-and-icily).

  peter’s letter was like a plum-cake of helps, hints and interest for both of us. first things first, says he, and congratulates us on our engagement. next, to business: he investigated about your poems, says: “the magazine is definitely interested in his poems, although they have not yet definitely decided for or against them. Edward Weeks will be seeing them soon; but I am afraid I cannot predict just when the decision will be made. These things depend so much on the magazine’s schedule and on how much room there is expected for poetry.”*

  obviously, there is hope. if they keep your manuscript four months it always means the head editor sees it and decides, which is a Good Thing anyway. only I wish they’d hurry. the blessed London Magazine hasn’t sent word yet and they’ve had your terrific batch over a month, which must mean Lehmann is ruminating. also, Nation and Poetry are off, both good prospects. whatever batch comes off back here first, I’ll add egg-head too (like some rich recipe) and send off.

  now listen, darling, this is nicest of all for you, us, etc. going on: HEARKEN: “About Ted’s other work, we would be extremely interested in considering the children’s fable.”(That’s the lovely animals o my dear ponk) “We have a small but effective children’s department here with a new young juvenile editor and we have done particularly well of late with a volume of children’s poems by W. J. Smith entitled “The Laughing Time”.* He also says you can ask publishers to forward manuscripts to other publishers and avoid this criss-crossing of the Atlantic ocean & bankrupting postage-charges. SO. After this strict week till the 13th, in which I am merely doing Chaucer and Augustine, I take out two whole days and type your fables and then Off To Mr. Davison. I am very confident, but we must brace ourselves for every slight or hitch in our fortunes and not go black if everything doesn’t immediately find a richly-paying-accepting-kudoing audience. THEY WILL.

  NOW: they say when you have enough for a book of adult fables they would also be very interested although, for adults, he says, fables “are extremely difficult things to sell,* and they would have to be quite extraordinary and original to be at all successful.” Of course, I think they are just that, but this should wait a year until you’ve written and sold enough to have created the audience and interest for a book.

  Peter is reassuring about copyright laws. Advises agent, who should handle all such matters when we get big enough for serial rights, movie rights, TV rights, technical details being workable, but very preoccupying. So, passing through New York, perhaps next spring, we’ll both wed agents for our stories; we should both have sold something by then. Peter also enclosed the Atlantic Press Novel Contest brochure. $5000 outright---$2500 of it as prize, $2500 as advance toward first royalties. Due date is June 30, so probably I better wait till a year from now in 1958, but What An Incentive! Peter will be terrific help. He tells me not to hurry, and “whether you have finished the novel in time for our contest or not,* I will be delighted and eager to read the manuscript and talk to you about it when you get back here.” Peter, my darling Teddy, is that rare rare good editor type person who is utterly unselfish and eager to work with creative writers for publication. It would be so nice, all of us being so young, if he could help us, and, we, in turn, could give him a reputation among the publishers and editors of New Discoveries. La, what prospects. Work Work Work. Crooked Aunts And Uncles, Please. Now, why not write fable-style stories in the Frank O’Connor manner (or Dylan Thomas, for that matter), meaning, putting yourself as a young-boy observer, thus giving a particular limited lens through which the reader sees the whole appalling or funny scene: instead of a separate book, short stories merely, to go with your fables? You’ve got terrific story material there, and if you wrote a good one or two, I’d send them off to Peter. We must see that a good half of his time this year is spent reading our manuscripts.

  I love you love you love you.

  Began “The Book of The Duchess” out loud to myself last night and broke the Chaucer paralysis.

  I must keep a hard head, not panicking at the seemingly endless stacks of reading. I will read all Chaucer, old and new, aloud in the evenings, saving my favorite reading for evening and doing drudgery in the afternoon, writing in morning. O the lovely sweetmeanderings on sleeplessness, the elaborate feather-bed, the dear story of Seys and Alcione:

  “And farewell, swete, my worldes blysse!

  I preye God youre sorwe lysse.

  To lytel while oure blysse lasteth!”*

  And the marvelous cave of sleeping gods and the water running down the cliff walls making a “dedly slepynge soun.” For every critical page, it must be two of Chaucer. Bless the day I can ignore this scholastic bicker and stick to sources.

  But a peace spread over me. All afternoon I’d read about: “To Carthage I came”* and about the cauldron of unholy loves singing. Bless Chaucer; bless the Wife of Bath. Bless the strong loving body.

  I think I’d like to change the title on my book of poems to “Firesong.” What think you. I’ve outgrown circuses, and flames of love, death, time and sun crackle everywhere in my book. I’d use Yeats as epigraph: “Everything that flames upon the night, Man’s own resinous heart has fed.”*

  I love your poem on the changeling.* But please leave off at: “Fondly I smile/Into your hideous eyes.” Have I your permission? If so, I’ll type it up. It’s too good a poem-as-poem to get slick and commercial-ironic about the baby-contest. Also, how about another word for “hideous”? I’d like better something that showed the eyes hideous, as in the fine “Snake’s twisted eye.”

  What’s title? “The Changeling”?

  Darling, you’re the wildest loveliest piece of flesh walking. If little girls scream, it is only in a kind of Bacchic ecstasy; the police are just jealous and want to convict such exceptional Samsonian excellence. I love you so.

  Went for walk after dinner last night; my old habit coming back---not waiting for dessert, but, sick, fed-up, ramping out of the chattering hall into the night to stride and stride ranting at what unlucky stars gimlet-eyed the clouds. Walked over bridges by our island, our benches, musing how many of our unborn children were squandered in love on earth, grass, carpets, couches, floorboards; all Cambridge hisses with your absence still keeping all those luminous meandering ghosts of who and where we were last spring.

  Darling, be s
crupulous and date your letters. When we are old and spent, they will come asking for our letters; and we will have them dove-tail-able.

  Your new plot* is eminently worthy of True Confessions; the woman, however, is a fool. Obviously she doesn’t love her husband. She should delight to be raped on the floor.

  Don’t be silly about your TV play; nothing you write should Ever Be Torn Up or Mangled. Save it, bring it to London for me to read.

  I love the “Horses of the Sun.” The close is terrific: “Read, wanted your dream-green countryside . . . . to “A thundering tossing upside-down team drags you on fire / Among the monsters of the zodiac.”

  I’ll send back this copy as you said---do you have another? Send it back, revised, and I’ll type out final copy. To go through piece by piece: again, I don’t think “horrible void” is the best you can do; I’m eternally suspicious of editorializing with horribles, terribles, awfuls and hideouses; make the void horrible; let your reader have the sweet joy of exclaiming: “ah! horrible!” Like “bland grain of air.” Does this line read right?: “You clock your progress, you garments your man:”? the last four words sound like a misprint slang: “You takes your choice,” that sort of thing. Don’t think, here, its good. Explicate this please. Don’t like garments in any case. How should it read from “O hold now”? Love the last two lines of the first verse.

  Like very much “steadfast saints of window and table and chair administer fresh faiths of light.” Like that kind of athletic inwoven metaphor which makes description both realistic, psychologically valid and musical. Again: “inert vegetative immensity” somehow sticks. “Sunlight pools green fields” is limpid and lovely; couldn’t you do better for either “vegetative” or “immensity”? Try like you showed me in Shakespeare, some monosyllabic concrete word to wed one or the other of those four-syllabled colossi.

  Please, to my denseness and satisfaction, explain the meaning of the first five lines of the last verse. I can’t criticize it properly till I’m sure: Is it really “you bouncing head”? If so, don’t approve of addressing it “Smile”, somehow sounds mock-heroic. Would like better: “Smile, with your heels in the reins, your bouncing head.” Or is it: “You bouncing head, read . . . ” No, because then the wandering is conjuring up a most peculiar image. Do not let me go astray because of typing-error or lack of proper punctuation; you must, wicked one, help the reader (probably I will be your most niggling demanding one) to read, because you know, your syntax is very difficult; as you admit yourself, your poems are damn hard to read, they are so complex, and so you must be careful to the death not to let any mere mechanical complexity---punctuation, grammar--- obstruct.

  As I said, the last four lines are perfect.

  I am enclosing my sentimental one; be strict in criticizing, for you are my one proper lens; even if you know I am blithering on about how I love you, it is a poem, and, as such, can be attacked brutally.

  You brute. I love you. Please come to London next weekend in spite of Carne-Ross or because of. I can work amazingly hard if I have something specific to live for. You. Next weekend.

  I love you like fury . . .

  your own sylvia

  (over for poem)

  Street Song:

  By a mad miracle I go intact

  Among the common rout

  Thronging sidewalk, street,

  And bickering shops;

  Nobody blinks a lid, gapes,

  Or cries that this raw flesh

  Reeks of the butcher’s cleaver,

  Its heart and guts hung hooked

  And bloodied as a cow’s split frame

  Parceled out by white-jacketed assassins.

  Oh no, for I strut it clever

  As a greenly escaped idiot,

  Buying wine, bread,

  Yellow-casqued chrysanthemums---

  Arming myself with the most reasonable items

  To ward off, at all cost, suspicions

  Roused by thorned hands, feet, head,

  And that great wound

  Squandering red

  From the pierced side.*

  Even as my each mangled nerve-end

  Trills its hurt out

  Above pitch of pedestrian ear,

  So perhaps I, knelled dumb by your absence,

  Alone am cursed to hear

  Sun’s parched phoenix-scream,

  Every downfall and crash

  Of gutted star,

  And world’s hinges’ incessant hiss

  Like some daft goose.*

  (I have copies of my ones, so just write about them and rip apart in your letters)

  Love,

  S.

  TO Ted Hughes

  Sun.–Mon. 7–8 October 1956

  TLS, family owned

  Sunday morning

  October 7, 1956

  Dearest love Teddy . . .

  A brilliant gray morning . . . sweet gift of an extra hour last night---why can’t they do that every day? All the new little girls including Janeen,* Dina, Jess, Marie, left for church this morning after breakfast armed with bibles talking about catching the service as if it were a bus. I beamed benevolently at them over my third atheistic cup of coffee and ate my existentialist egg; they really are very sweet, but, my god, so young, so young. In twenty days I shall have completed my 24th year and begun my 25th---I am cruel in putting it this way, but it is true; a quarter of a century gone to pot; and please the lord let there be three more quarter centuries all blessed by your presence, come day, come night, come hurricane and holocaust . . .

  O Teddy, how I repent for scoffing in my green and unchastened youth at the legend of Eve’s being plucked from Adam’s left rib; because the damn story’s true; I ache and ache to return to my proper place, which is curled up right there, sheltered and cherished; I am sure you, as a man, will hack out some sort of self-sufficience in this year, missing only one rib; but I; my whole sense of being is blasted by your absence; and I am again having the most terrible of nightmares, no matter how stoically I go about in the day; it all catches up at night; last night it was you and you---terribly realistic, and then this gruesome series of Ethiopian tribal ceremonies all centering about totems, purifying rituals, and most terrible; perhaps over all was the epigraph of Augustine’s I read yesterday---“Verily some have become eunuchs for Thy sake.” God, it’s terrible; the daily world I can wrest, amid great hurt and void, more and more to my will, but I get to dread the night so; before supper I can feel it coming on me, and I get cloyed at supper and don’t want to eat, and rush out into the dark, and walk blindly; and then read, putting off bed and putting it off; and then those damn nightmares.

  I will, actually, be glad when classes begin; it will give me a rooted sense of obligation which I need; of speaking with my tutors or dons and on a level in which this howling loss I feel can not yell out; but it gets even and rides me to foam and gnashing of teeth all night.

  Yesterday, right after lunch, I took my sketch-paper and strode out to the Granchester Meadows where I sat in the long green grass amid cow dung and drew two cows; my first cows. They sat obligingly while I drew the first, couchant, its head very cowish, but its body, more like a horsehair sofa, very flat and unmodeled; then, suddenly, they all got hungry and got up in a drove; I think they were bulls; they seemed to have no udders. So I forged ahead, sat down on the river brink, and did a quick sketch of one grazing, or, rather, of several put into one, as they all moved continually, so the side muscles are all wrong, but most decorative; I got a kind of peace from the cows; what curious broody looks they gave me; what marvelous colossal shits and pissings. I shall go back soon; I shall do a volume of cow-drawings.

  Various people biking past or strolling to Granchester stared at me, way out there, drawing the cows; it is so strange, this feeling of abnormality I get away from you---like your experience with police and little girls; I feel, in my singular passions and furies, that I become a gargoyle, and that people will point. One thing, I certainly prefer being alon
e; I shun people like poison; I simply don’t want them; I sit and answer the countless questions of the new girls at table; I find myself being funny and making them laugh with descriptions of people & events, and wonder that I can operate so mechanically, with such little feeling, still retaining the habits of a sane person, without being discovered. There are very dear girls here; sweet, pretty, serious; but I feel like some eon-old matriarch who has been through ice age and 40-day flood; they chirp like new-hatched sparrows. They know I write---the Fulbright commission saw they knew that; I am always rather amazed that, according to Janeen, the commission knows me so well; they must have spied; also, they know I am engaged. Jess endeared herself incredibly to me by asking about what you wrote; “What does your Ted write?” she said. I told her briefly, restraining myself only with great effort from imparting my apocalyptic vision of your blazing, radiant future in which all the Wasters and Spenders of this world stand confounded.

  You will perish laughing: I was glancing through the new Varsity handbook* last night and discovered a new society on campus: THE CAMBRIDGE MAKERS!* O love, guess what, guess founded by whom! Yes, sweet Leftover is providing, hush-hush, the Creative Sounding Board for “secret writers”,* for those shy undiscovered ones who can get doctored, who can get their plaints heard; master-surgeons will be invited to speak from time to time; you can be a member through submitting an ms. or (o holy of holies) published work; the impeccable infallible stainless Mr. Levenson will judge whether one shall “sell much of such work”. God, how free I feel, leaping such lisping mispronouncings and having direct commerce with the best editors in the world---America, America, God Shed His Grace On Thee.

  I brought, from my walk yesterday, a purple thistle and a dandelion cluster home with me, and drew them both in great and loving detail; I also did a rather bad drawing of a teapot and some chestnuts, but will improve with practice; it gives me such a sense of peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything. I can close myself completely in the line, lose myself in it; shall I tell you my latest ambition? It is to make a sheaf of detailed stylized small drawings of plants, mail-boxes, little scenes, and send them to the New Yorker which is full of these black-and-white things---if I could establish a style, which would be a kind of child-like simplifying of each object into design, peasantish decorative motifs, perhaps I could become one of the little people who draws a rose here, a snowflake there, to stick in the middle of a story to break the continuous mat of print; they print everything from wastebaskets to city-street scenes.