The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
Page 148
no teas, sherries or bothers. I like life like this; for the first time, have no conscience pangs about leading it full scale, which I always did when I depended on friends and admirers, having no one I was completely realized with. I love the plot about the party;* please don’t apologize for drawing on my own experience---you will do best doing that, I think: showing me, in a way, what and how I can draw from my own life: like the “invisible man” might never (or at least, never so soon) have become a story if you didn’t pick up the metaphor I used and suggest story. all these plots are in my head, gestating. it is the most terrific way; each time I write, now, I’ll pluck the ripest.
I like your idea for the play;* could be a terrific character study; also, do work on snatchcraftington. I’m sure your children’s fables will find an audience (publishing) in the course of a year and it would be good to have snatchcraftington ready to offer up after your first success.
am pleased about the nimbus editor* asking for you: it is a beautifully set-up magazine (I, too, read auden’s poems* and was appalled---there was such an unpleasant nastiness to them; like grinding metal; if someone would print these poems in paragraph form, I think it might embarrass hell out of the “poet”, because it’s atrocious prose; how can editors be so blind?) let’s wait till the next batch of poems comes back (you’ve got them out still at the atlantic, london magazine, nation and poetry)---and make up a group from whatever rejects the others send back and mail it to nimbus. all those 4 magazines should send them back by the end of this month. if only one of my 4 stories and your children’s fables would be accepted now. I get much sadder about prose return than poetry, somehow.
off and on have had the strangest dreams---as if my story about dreams in part exorcised my worry about bad dreams. sunday night, had a lovely rich one, brightly colored, about finding a patch of huge green four-leaf clovers with you and picking three (somebody must have accepted something this monday!); also sat by water, writing, looking into dazzling sea-gull crammed sky; as they landed, they became ducks, very white (that damn poem of wain’s,* wasn’t it?); anyhow, I was writing an immortal sonnet about it, correcting etc., and with the casual cocksureness of dreams, didn’t bother to memorize it when I was writing, but knew it had the words “luminous vein” in it and was indeed a very luminous poem. Last night, I was sitting on a resort beach clad oddly enough in my paisley velvet jersey with matching slippers and wearing leopard pants---which had turned, I remember thinking, orange (with black spots), orange with age---I compared them to a leopard kitten playing nearby on the sand and my pants were very definitely more orange with age; I was lolled in a deck chair, talking with eva gabor and a south american princess (looking much like one of our indian girls) who showed me a map of south america and a tiny principality around where brazil should be called rigi or something where she ruled; a motor-boat all shining and speeding loomed over the horizon and dragged all the people swimming, water-skiing, and sail-boating in the sea up on the sand; if this keeps up, I shouldn’t worry about my nights anymore. I think it shows my powers of observations must be improving. I love you, every bit of you, and kiss your damn london-gone mouth and love you – please go on writing – I love your letters –
your own
sylvia
Why not ask Carne-Ross if you can read some Crow Ransom – CR for CR?*
Have just sent Luke’s poems off to Poetry – felt Atlantic would wait too long if they liked them – Poetry seems most quick & accepting of your genius.*
TO Ted Hughes
Wednesday 17 October 1956
TLS, family owned
Wednesday morning early
october 17
dearest love ted . . .
it is a black day: warm, humid, heavy with unshed rain; your letter* came, so did a large battered envelope from mademoiselle rejecting my 3 stories. I knew it would come, but some small foolhardy little part of me didn’t know it for sure and was sorry and depressed. it is good, I suppose, in a queer way, for both of us to have got our first triple prose offerings back; it will make us (at least me) build up a kind of defiant high-pressure resentment and maybe fight harder; better than getting a too-easy acceptance and then relaxing and getting rejections. you see how the paltry mind tries to rationalize away its disillusion---it’s all for the best, said god, as he turned out one misshapen pot after another. do cheer me up. that day in manchester certainly was infuriatingly wasted; but that is not the way to think. who knows what glories lie ahead. what mademoiselle and new yorker editors will, in years to come, be writing us coy notes begging us to send “something for Them.” they will, too, if we work constantly and hard enough. that I know. we’re really only scraping off the first scum, as you said; only, only, I do not think I will feel much worse if these last 4 stories are rejected. I have only sent the “stick man” out,* and am saving the other 3 till it’s come back and I’ve rewritten the “invisible man”. that should sell. it honestly should. somewhere.
how I love your letters. picture me sitting at the head of the long table in whitstead dining room, immersed in reading and re-reading your words (except for one or two of the latter, I can read your writing fine; it is beautiful writing; it is the writing of a genius and a teddy-ponk), letter propped up against butter dish, eyes cutting through the charcoal smoke arising from the toaster which the 3 indian girls don’t know how to use yet---“they say the burnt part is good for you,” one indian observed philosophically this morning; I speak not; I had fried potatoes and bacon and buttered brown toast and two cups of coffee this morning; my favorite breakfast, to make up for the huge rejection and the subtraction of just one more dream from the batch flittering rainbows in my head.
today: to finish the parts necessary of the “city of god” and write a paper for tomorrow morning; I shall probably be compelled to write a poem in the old procrastinator’s tradition. I don’t like today; not at all; I felt depressed, too, last night for some reason: bought a bottle of sherry and couldn’t get the cork out all day, which became a looming Thing: I realized, in time, that I couldn’t run hectically downstairs in the late evening, begging someone to open the damn thing, as if I were some sort of unspeakable addict; finally, at night, I got it open piece by piece and drank a glass to wash down the more ascetic rant of augustine. I am probably the strongest fiend in this house anyway.
after my supervision tomorrow (and I think it will be good & make me feel better to get back into thinking form with dr. krook), I begain again to write 4 hours each morning; it is such a blessing, as I look ahead, to have completely spacious days.
Your dear letter came this morning along with one from mother---all aglow about next year; she’s being, for the first time in her life, blessedly “social”---she even had a “date”; my god; I am proud of her. She’s driving about the country (she never could drive before last year, a necessity for being able to see friends in our vast country) visiting her favorite people, going to plays, and, I gather, everybody is trying to draw her out, so she won’t brood about the echoing house and my grammy’s absence, which must be terrifically oppressing, after a lifetime of her living with us. She is overjoyed that Beethoven is Your Man and no doubt will be stocked with his lps when we come (she is much relieved it’s not Hindemith or those twelve-tone scale guys; my records of them were a trial to her). Her planning about our wedding really saves her from depression; I’m so glad we can give her that. If you want to write her, the address is:
26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts: USA
No future word of our mss. I am surprised. I feel they will all pile up (acceptance) around the end of the month; have large hopes. Very quiet on Cambridge front; not a single invitation or pestering; I like very much. My room is a green haven; feel like writing (will have to wait till end of week after supervision, since I threw proportion off so by these last two days on your ms.) But I feel I can bring a focus of powers to bear that I never knew I had; like I began to do on the “Invisible Man.” Must write man
y letters to people, contests, etc.
Still, green day today; I observe all clearly now, from a deep seat way back, taking notes in my head; sat in wet still yard yesterday and drew an anemone; before bed last night, over hot milk and hair-drying, as a treat for going through the Big Typing, I began reading my “Painted Caravan”* book; it is my favorite book; I have the queerest love for holding it, staring at the pictures; read the introduction in which the author claims the Gypsies have incorporated all the ritualistic rites of all religions and cults in their Tarot pack (a sort of World-Book) and that the Initiate can penetrate beyond the surface denotative meaning of the symbols, through the veils, etc. to the Alone. I meditated on the Fool and the Juggler, staring at the pictures, reading and re-reading the lucid, pleasantly written descriptions of them and their significance. I shall go through the whole book slowly this way, so that I shall come upon the difficulties of setting out the Pack with a basic sense, at least, of the cards, which will flow and re-cross and blend, I think, by great concentration and much practice. I really look forward to giving this my deepest love and attention; I feel very “kin” to the cards, sort of.
This weekend with you was so fine; I feel it was best, just browsing among books and sitting open to the evening in that blue-green park;* you are the creative force in my world and cosmos which gives my own force direction and meaning; all I do and concentrate on now, is in the deep unalterable sense of my living in your presence which is here, although invisible. I love you and love you.
Get all you can, judiciously, out of Carne-Ross; will send some of my poems which maybe you can leave with him next week after your reading; I don’t envy you London, but milk it dry; eat steak; know how I love you; bless my Birthday
my love to my own husband & Teddy-ponk –
SYLVIA
TO Ted Hughes
Thursday 18 October 1956*
TLS on Newnham College
letterhead, family owned
thursday afternoon 2:30
october 17
forgive this
dearest darling ted . . .
I am in my usual post-supervision thursday coma; having miraculously, as usual, completed in the small hours of 2 am or so a 13 page paper outlining the uniqueness & chief tenets of the christian gospel, contrasting their tone & assurance with platonic writing, and bringing up my questions and objections to the christian view of the origin, nature and continuance of evil; god’s foreknowledge and man’s free will, and the low, debased view of physical love between man and women even in “blameless wedlock.”* for an hour and a half this morning, rain falling outside, I read this, argued, discussed, and was illuminated by my lovely dr. krook; I feel at last, as if I am not working in a vacuum. she is willing to take me all this term on the british moralists, and even the next on whatever literary moralists I choose; my reading is damn thorough, a paper every week, and my review of exams should be familiar ground.
but now though I feel free,* momently, of pressure (hooker & the cambridge platonists* for next week), I’m too tired to do anything creative; maybe I’ll try a nap this afternoon; I’m going to an english-speaking union* sherry to meet new overseas students and the countess of tunis late this afternoon with dina and janean; I am going to the english club tonight to hear kenneth muir*---they have enough good speakers coming for me to join. I am very much alone. Jenean typifies vividly all I dislike most in extrovert, surface, blithering america: sorority president, silly conventional patter all the time, enthusiastic about everything continually without the slightest vestige of reserve or discrimination. all the rest of the girls are vehement catholics; narrow, secure, and incredibly pious. I really think of dr. krook as my one woman friend, here; she is the kind of teacher I would slave to be and these next two terms should be deeply rewarding just for what I can learn of lecturing and discussion-leading from her; jane baltzell is another extrovert and her life is spent continually in company of people I find intolerably artificial, like that oswald-theater set I tried to avoid so last spring. so I walk alone. and I really am all right.
granta writes that they are printing an old story I turned in last year, “the day mr. prescott died”,* which I believe I read to you. it seems slight to me now, but I’ll probably proof-read it tomorrow and try to palm of my dream story or oswald story on them, although both are rather long. all else is quiet as death; in a week from the day after tomorrow I’ll be seeing you again. dr. krook thinks it is too bad for me you aren’t working in london or in nearby area: she suggests trying the american army base english schools which pay fabulous sums, something like £15 a week for only two full evenings of lecturing; they have bases everywhere. I wonder if they employ britishers; I should think they might. but spain is probably best. I would almost rather be either fully with you for a long period and fully away while I must work, than be torn when with you by knowing I must leave in a day, and torn when away by counting the days till I return. but I’ll miss you terribly when you go to spain. at least, if you don’t go till the end of october it will mean only 5 weeks before I am with you for 5 weeks altogether.
tomorrow I start writing in the mornings again. I will change* the donkey-story elephant to ant. I don’t think there are any other inconsistencies beside this and I am probably over-sticky, but I read the thing as a whole; I still wish you would change the polar-bear story elephant to some other strong useful tree-uprooting creature, though. I can see your point keeping the ear-fanning.
I am terrifically happy you got the stories to the children’s program girl with such dispatch; even if they eschew familiar sweating fallible finger-burning vegetable-cooking gods, there are other fine stories in it that don’t mention god; alas, of course, my favorites do: torto, whale-wort, and demon---which I think are exquisite and charming. when I send the stuff to peter, I shall ask him to take god as in marc connelly’s play “green pastures”* which was a great success in america where god was a negro, the whole thing the negro’s concept of the bible; I think god smoked a cigar. anyway, there is certainly a precedent for your familiar way of presenting god; a kind of childlike innocence of fear and trembling, making it all very concrete poetic story without I think any “danger” of overthrowing the young reader’s faith in an omniscient invulnerable abstract god---but the lord alone knows what are the editorial scruples about offending Religion.
I am blithering; I am very tired. I wish I could curl up in your lap. let me know immediately if anything happens re fables & also what poems of yours carne-ross has you read. please please send me the copy of “egg-head” along with the rest when you’re through, so I can make copies of them to keep on eternal file. I’ll send you some of mine to leave him in time for your reading.
no news of manuscripts after the mlle rejection; we each have four things out. probably good news will all come at once. I would fly up with joy if your children’s fables---any or all---get accepted by the BBC.
will write better tomorrow. am appalled at mr. redgrove’s following of c-r---the latter must get ulcers every time he goes into a bar and sees the gleaming machiavellian advances of the former; also, am glad he can brag of his poems (is their any chance of their publication?) but am appalled at the taste of the praisers. I’ll stick to yeats and you, thanks. I love you and love you---take care, eat steak, and I kiss and kiss your mouth and all over in crannies & nooks my dear lovely own Teddy –
your
sylvia
TO Ted Hughes
Friday 19 October 1956
TLS on Newnham College
letterhead, family owned
friday morning
october 19
dearest love teddy . . .
you will get two letters together because of a strange missing to mail one at dinner last night because of an occurence I’ll tell you that seems to me good omened, and probably what I was destined to follow up . . .
/> spent a miserable dull tedious afternoon before the fire in the midst of which I wrote you yesterday, unable to read or write, being very tired; shall not let lateness happen again; I got last year’s late hour from 4 am to 2 am; next week shall be 12, next 10pm etc. I can’t afford to waste afternoons. anyhow, in spite of a headache, I walked out into the sultry wet with jabbering janean & went for the first time to the english speaking union which was an experience in itself.
that old house on trinity street, right, with white plaster & dark beams, very fine inner room, same way; it was a reception, I found out, for the new americans; god knows how I got invited, being an old one. anyway, I drank sherry, devoured canapes, and conversed with various vintage toothy englishwomen; suddenly hundreds of strange americans converged on me, calling me, disquietingly enough, by my name, and begging didn’t I remember them. I managed my usual story of being a cretin about remembering names and places, so they told: one little sweet quiet girl was from smith and married to a husband here on a marshall grant; a striking handsome couple*---big tall dark though sort of open-faced shiny boy and his stalwart vivid red-haired wife reminded me I’d been at their wedding (at which, I remembered, I distinguished myself by drinking at least several gallons of champagne); yet another was a young minister, friend of a married couple I know at the new york theological seminary; still another was the most mixed-up little girl I’ve ever seen with big batting eyelashes whose parents have been sending her around, for about the last 1o years from one university to another which she’s never finished; she, I found to my dismay, was the girl who sent the letter of elephants, giraffes and black natives carrying mailboxes, which I’d never bothered to answer; she is breathily interested in liturgical art . . . .