by Sylvia Plath
your loving wife
sylvia
TO Ted Hughes
Wednesday 10 October 1956
TLS, family owned
Wednesday morning
October 10
O dear darling Teddy-one . . .
The eyes and ears of the world are upon me: just got an exeat for Friday and Saturday night, lied straight in the clouded lapis lazuli eyes of my tutor (“I’m having a reunion with a girlfriend of mine from Oxford on a fellowship”---she really does exist, is there, Jane reports, on her Marshall, but I haven’t heard a word from her, probably won’t; I am supposedly staying in the YW on Great Russell street but left a loophole by saying Sue might get a place at a friend’s apartment. I feel cold and unscrupulous as a cobra. Mrs. Milne, when I told her I’d be gone, a few moments ago, coyly and sillily pulled my scarf---whereupon I almost bashed her one at her familiarity, touching the hem of my most untouchable garments---and giggled “And what would you be doing in London?” I gave her a basilisk glare; being had by my husband, what else?) Now I sit after one faculty appointment, before another, feeling like hell.
O Teddy, I am so sick; literally sick to my stomach. Why do I have this terrible revulsion at the words and gestures of everybody who is not you? While listening to my Director of Studies, Miss Burton, meander on about classes, papers, etc. for our Part II group, I held my hand over my mouth and froze; I could very horribly hear myself screaming at all the prim scholarly little British bitches, knocking over desks, and strangling as many as I could get my hands on; God I was glad I’m taking part II in two years when I heard their crammed schedules---no time to brood-muse-meditate or do anything but grind it out. I’ll have Dr. Krook and moralists this term (I’m going to try and get her to continue next term, too); I’ll call this woman up about German reading, which will be a help, & get started there. Next term is Chaucer, although we have a meeting with the Pregnant Woman this afternoon. I am, to my horror, assigned to a Practical Crit. class (as is everyone) with a fat vampirish monster Miss Pitt* whom I’d thought to escape; I have a morbid desire to cut open her fat white flesh each time I see her and see if its onion juice or what that keeps her going; I shall try, desperately, to get out of it by pleading I have to do the reading in order to criticise and wouldn’t it be Better Miss Burton if I used that precious hour to read in? I can just hear her soft snaky voice: “Do both.”
Teddy Teddy Teddy: I have the feeling that if only I see you, just curl up warmly with you, all this tension, the gorging of fury which I eat again and again until it crams my throat, all this will flow gently away and there will be peace peace peace. You must scold me, beat me, help me. This gift of creative passion I’ve somehow been blessed with is now ironically turning in on itself and blighting me; away from you, it is as if my hair were shorn, my tongue cut out, and my whole body reduced to some cold ungainly clay that plods about not knowing what the hell it was made for. You say your bus Friday gets in at seven. Well I’ll take a train getting me into King’s Cross at 7:35. Meet me there? If there’s a waiting room, I’ll go to it; the day after tomorrow; I can’t conceptualize it; I am dying some death. I’ll stay till Sunday; there’s a Braque exhibit at the Tate* I think; I am quite mad.
Later: managed to persuade Miss Burton to postpone the Practical Crit. till next term by telling her I would be no addition to any class until I’d finished my rigorous private reading program covering the periods I know nothing of; it’s true, too, unlike most of the things I’ve been telling official people lately; I find, alarmingly, that I am just the kind of person who can lie successfully: I have a direct honest look; I am plausive as the devil with my reasons; my actress-side is sensitive to mood and situation and, without calculation on my part, responds as the occasion demands. The secret of perfect lying is to believe to your heart and guts that you are right and that they are all silly-rule-mongers and deserve no confidence or obedience; I am so rock-firm in my conscience about our marriage that I feel, of course, no guilt; only a cold pragmatic intellectual sequence of reasoning how I can best keep them blind to my marriage and my living with my husband every second I can. I must be always prepared, by some quirk or other, to be discovered; and be prepared to quell them nobly.
Yesterday afternoon it was miraculous and sunny; I went on a long solitary walk along the Backs, stared at the incredible color and splendor of Clare gardens; sat down under the tent of a Clare willow and wrote a description* of the gardens and ducks; squelched coolly and with great efficiency two fresh little first year boys who hung about; walked over to green promontory by Mill Bridge braving the raised-wing attack and hiss of two terrifyingly militant swans, and did the outlines of a rather potential drawing of the Anchor & Boat House which I shall fill in on the next good day. (“Nice to see you again,” the British girl says to someone outside my door; “Nice to see you.” the someone replies.) Oh, God, why is everybody so banal? The two new British girls* in the house take over the breakfast table conversation (there never was any before they came) with all the professional suavity of a hired hostess: “Yes, our mornings are misty, don’t you think?” Gone are the lax easy blissfully grumpy breakfasts of last year, broken only by Jane or me or Margaret guffawing over letter or New Yorkers. I rudely and silently read my mail; which means you; not one editorial correspondence yet---rejection or acceptance. To satisfy my continual checkings, I made a list of what we both have out on what dates: there is much:
May 22:
Atlantic: your poems.
Sept 3:
London Magazine: your poems.
Sept 6:
CS Monitor: my Benidorm article & drawings.
Sept 17:
New Yorker: your 3 fables. Mademoiselle: my 3 stories.
Sept 29:
Nation & Poetry: your poems.
Oct. 3:
Atlantic & Nation: my poems.
As of this month, the Atlantic press will have your book and the New Yorker my 4 stories; I am in the middle of the invisible man. I practice going around feeling invisible.
I must write my tutors for appointments. I have now only two classes I’ll go to: Krook and Holloway,* from 9 to 11 Tuesday. And two supervisions. Will read Chaucer, French and all Oxford books of poetry on my own. Can’t wait to try Women’s Magazine stories. The murderer one is great; I’d love to try a New Yorker version of this hysterical couple one, with the crying child; (two helicopters just burred by very low; like fish spinning tops in the celestial sea).
I really think your new version of “Secret Phaetons” is fine; I like it very very much; I also, and am very serious, thought the leprechaun parody possible; I know you were being funny, but the idea is small and nice; why don’t you, as a finger-limbering exercise, try several of these innocent poems, (this could be condensed) that meet a certain simple criterion for light amusement, and we’ll send them to the New Yorker; I wish you’d revise the Pecos Bill* one; make them short and sweet and we’ll probably earn fantastic amounts of money. Bring whatever you’ve done on the TV play to London; I’ll bring Chaucer & the little I’ve oozed out.
Teddy, I feel I’m walking in my grave cerements. My flesh is colder than wet sod. Do you know that you have the most delicious quirked lovely mouth and your eyes crink up and you are all warm and smooth and elegantly muscled and long-striding and my god I go mad when I let myself think of you; the thinking assaults me and I either cry or pound my head, or go out on a long blind wild walk or pretend pretend you are there and talk out loud to you at night before bed I kneel on the couch in the pitch black and throw all my force and love in the direction, as nearly as I can discern, of your bed in Yorkshire. I am living until Friday in a kind of chill controlled hysteria; when I wash my hair, now, it will be for you; when I drink water, it is for you; when I get dressed it is for you. I can’t believe any body ever loved like this; nobody will again. We will burn love to death all our long lives; I shall never let you have a day-long job, for I couldn’t live that long without kissing and ki
ssing your dear special particular mouth.
Last night I read a long involved Jean Stafford story* in the New Yorker and had one of my apocalyptic visions: someday, I will be a rather damn good woman writer. Suddenly, I feel this queer sense that, in time, I can surpass her; and Even Eudora. If I live “in-myself” this way, all the quirks and queer musings in my head can bear fruit, without being blurred and blunted by constant prosaic contacts with exterior people; this year will set me deeper than ever in the dark secret well of my own fancies, dreams and visions; living with you will save me from being suffocated with no outlet (except these interminable letters, please forgive their length & tediums) as I am now.
Do get in touch with Carne-Ross when you come to London; and promise me that the weekend before you go to Spain we may again spend together in London; I hope we can find a good unobtrusive hotel where we’ll see no one we know. I’ll bring my sketch-paper and maybe you’ll see me through a drawing or two in medias res. It’s such a protection, having you at my side. I feel really vulnerable as a Victorian maiden away from you: geese attack me, cows stampede on me; people stare until I tell them to go to hell. I keep telling myself I have more right to be here than they do; I am really a very shy person. With a kind of brazen cocky sheath like the armor of a turtle or armadillo or porcupine prickles.
Thurber’s fables, I am sure, are the work of senility; the singsong rhyming and painful punning and moralizing is strangely disquieting to me. I love you and think and know you are the most brilliant writer and will be more and astound the green babbling world and are the only man and husband and giant walking; please write you will meet me at Kings Cross then – I love you to hell and back and to every last cell of my being & thought –
love to my darling lovely ponky own ted –
your
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 16 October 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Tuesday noon, October 16
Dearest mother . . .
It was with joy that I received your dear letter from Hartford with all the news about your active life; I’m so happy you are getting about and seeing your friends; it is amazing how necessary a car is in our vast country simply to keep up with people in the same town! I am just through with the colossal job of typing Ted’s children’s book manuscript: “How The Donkey Became And Other Fables” (9 fables in all, 61 pages). I spent two solid days at it (he is going to try to get a reading of some sort for it on the BBC Children’s Program) and this week I send it off to Peter Davison and the Atlantic Press. It is a classic, I think; I know it almost by heart now, having listened during the writing in Spain this summer, suggested the revising, listened again, and, finally typed the whole work up in 3 copies (two carbons). The Olivetti has got constant use since purchase; in the lull of the next weeks, I’ll go have the action tuned up---it’s a bit sticky; can I have it done free at that place where you bought it? I want to sell my other type-writer and, for Ted & me next summer & next year, get a sturdy, table model with a type-face just like Warren’s which I love. I dislike the crooked badly lettered type-face on my Corona after this neat Olivetti, and like Warren’s bold squarish print. Should I advertise to sell it here, so I won’t have to lug it home, or bring it home for a trade-in; that might be best. No word yet from Fulbright re sailing dates; shall I write and ask Patsy to be my maid-of-honor anyway? If her religion means she can’t (will you ask Betty Aldrich about this first), I’d ask Ruthie, and 3rd choice, Marty Plumer or even Elly Friedman (I’m a bit dubious about Marty’s height is all). I’ll try to send Nancy and MB gifts of some sort soon, after this first packed week; I would love to have you send the brief-case to me (when you said you preferred “seasoned” leather, did you mean this briefcase was seasoned?) We need to save money, and it will help; did I tell you that along with Ted’s charcoal gray suit I have made him get a lovely brown-and-black tweed jacket made (of his own choice tweed) which he wore to London last weekend and looked handsome as a Duke. He could do with another, though. I’d postpone shirts till America, when I can take proper care of them; I’ll try to get him a bathrobe; what he needs very badly is a kind of leather shaving kit & I thought Warren might help you select one for him, with hairbrush, nail-file, shaving soap & brush (he uses a regular razor); how about that from both of you? He also needs luggage; but that would be too much to send; he needs just about everything; let me choose his ties, he is very particular & only likes one or two.
Our London weekend has given me a new calm & dispelled that first hectic suffocating wild depression I had away from my husband for the first time in our married life; it almost began with a nightmare: I’d arranged to have Ted meet me at King’s Cross station about 7:30, but when I found he was getting in to the bus station at 7, decided to take an early train to Liverpool St. and meet him; I wrote a letter to this effect which, if he didn’t receive, I figured would be all right as I’d be at the bus terminal from 6 on and would have no chance of missing him; well, I waited from 6 to 8 at the terminal and the bus he was supposed to take came, and he wasn’t on it; the bus terminal inspectors were all callous cretins, and the most I could get out of them was that all busses were in, and no accidents reported; I was really frantic, unable to understand why Ted wasn’t on one of them; he’d bought reservations; so, in a fury of tears, I fell sobbing into a taxi & for 20 minutes begged him to hurry to King’s Cross to see if by some miracle Ted might be there; I was sick, not knowing what to do but yell raving through the streets of London; well, to shorten the trauma, I walked into King’s Cross into Ted’s arms---he’d made the bus driver drop him off early so he could get to me sooner and had been worried about my not arriving on the train, not having got my later letter. He looked like the most beautiful dear person in the world; everything began to shine, and the taxi driver sprouted wings, and all was fine. For two blessed days we wandered about together, sitting in parks, browsing in book shops, reading aloud, eating fruit, and just basking in each other’s presence; for the first time, now, I feel I can work and concentrate and manage this stoic year. Ted makes his BBC recording on Oct. 24, so I’ll manage to get down on the 27th to celebrate my birthday with him, one more reunion before he goes off to Spain; I have never dreamed that love could be so incredibly transforming; I am no longer, miraculously, a self-concerned individual, but part of a miniature cosmos all of which revolves around my dear darling Ted; have written several of my best short stories this week, which he criticized in London; my best: “The Invisible Man”, I have great hopes for---about this charming extroverted versatile chap who is invisible to himself alone and no one else, & what happens. Maybe it’ll be a classic too, to add to Peter Schlemiel* & Hoffmann’s mirror-imageless man;* I can’t wait to send it off. Love your letters---only 8 months till we’re Home---bless Warren for me; love to Grampy---
your own
sivvy
TO Ted Hughes
Tuesday 16 October 1956
TLS, family owned
Tuesday noon: October 16
Dearest Teddy . . .
The Great Calm has descended; I just got back from mailing your copy of “How the Donkey Became And Other Fables” (registered) to Peter Redgrove; a letter enclosed with it tells all corrections and questions I have about it. It is strange, but now, after this weekend of savouring and plunging deep deep into the presence of you, I feel a new peace, a new calm, and that hectic stifled desperation is gone; I am obviously taking my place among the Stoic Orders. I feel now that I am walking on a place totally different and apart from anyone else, and the presence of the mobs and yattering misses around me no longer distracts and obsesses; for the first time, deep in me (and not just pasted on top of a seething mass of circumstance by a wishful intellect) I know I can do this year; and do it with an intensity and concentration that will make you proud of me. Being vulnerable and fallible, I suppose, I may have lapses into loneliness from your being away, where my
will urges me to pack up and find you; but my reason, or whatever induces this strange wonderful inner calm and deep, introverted love will keep me together.
Enough; or I shall be talking only to myself; I could do your great and awe-inspiring ms. only because dear lovely Dr. Krook put my supervision on Thursday at 11 (for which I must yet read parts of the “City of God”* and write, alas, and already, a paper;* today and tomorrow I have, though). Went to lecture today; she is incredibly lucid; I would like to be her disciple this year; shall go to all her lectures: they are clear and cadenced as a piece of exquisite music; I can grow by her. Holloway was very disappointing a tall, pale, quick-eyed dark-haired chap with horn-rimmed spectacles and a fluid meandering talk which implies it’s much more important than it is. He proposes to talk on Ideas In English Literature (“Some Major Themes”) which he outlined today as Reason; Unreason; Progress; Circe’s Garden; Evolution; History etc. I began to feel like rising and shouting “Fraud fraud”, as Mr. Huys once cried at me (oh Danny-boy) as Holloway generously offered to allow an hour for each of these subjects. We got Reason this morning---a most spurious kind of skip-skimming with specific footnoted (book, paragraph, line) references to Antony & Cleo, Hamlet, Hooker, Milton---mere jump references to the use of the word “reason” which I found highly obvious and useless. I may give him one more chance, as I can’t imagine what he would say on Circe’s Garden. But if this is the kind of cotton-stuffing Cambridge pays her young genii to give, no, no. His kind of versatility (as revealed in these lectures, at least) seems only that impressive “mass knowledge” jumped over by grasshopper minds who find by picking a “theme”, or rather, wringing a theme out of a conglomeration of works, they can dream up some large coherent elucidation of the world’s thought in 8 hours. I become more and more reassured about my own ability to give Freshman lectures in America. A pox on surveys; I shall stick to specific texts until they know a few of my favorite men by heart, as well as their own dreams. Holloway drops specific references like crown-jewels---it’s supposed to impress and convince of a richness which I simply can’t find. Well, that’s one lecture only a week now; I may try Lewis* on Chaucer background; shall see.