The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2
Page 26
Ted wants to know if you’d like to order any more copies of his book through him, because he can get them at a discount and we don’t want you to get them in the shops and waste money that way: if you want some for gifts, tell us how many & we’ll order them.
Yesterday we drove through the beautiful countryside, into the mountains over to Holyoke hospital to visit David Keightley, an Amherst graduate, 1953 & friend of Russ Moro, that boy who gave us dinner the night we arrived in NYC. Ted had met Dave in Cambridge, & I’d just glimpsed him at Russ’s dinner, so we didn’t really know him, but he wrote us a touching letter asking if we’d sometime drop over: on a rainy day last August 26 he and Russ drove into a tree after a skid on a slippery hill, and while Russ, driving, only had some cuts & a broken nose, and is now in NYC, David, in the driver’s seat, was badly knocked up and suffered a smashed thigh. So he has been in traction for over 7 weeks. Ted & I stayed all afternoon, talking to him & really getting acquainted: he is a charming, sensitive boy, one of the junior editors of the World Publishing Co, and he obviously wanted to talk to get his mind off his pain: a few remarks slipped out: he does feel Russ’s carelessness to blame, & since Russ is just drifting about NYC & David has a job waiting, he feels it’s ironic to be so isolated and he must be in real pain, as his muscles are atrophying from lack of exercise. I’ve never seen anyone in traction before, & it must be ghastly to lie & not turn over, with pins through your leg and hundreds of weights & pulleys night & day. We’ll go again to visit him in 2 weeks---I feel it takes his mind off his situation & forces him to think of other things: we brought him a box of candy, since we couldn’t get flowers or think of anything else, as we didn’t know him, but he doesn’t have much appetite & I wish I could figure out something that would cheer him up. But I suppose our coming is enough.
I felt strangely rested, even though very tired, simply seeing someone outside the faculty and student community, who had a different kind of trouble, and to whom we could talk frankly. I wish we could get to know more people outside the faculty, and gradually develop an outside life: it is a rest to be away from my job, which I wasn’t at all till yesterday afternoon, & I find it little relaxation to have evenings with the people in the department: the specter of my questions hovers always in the background & they don’t want to talk shop any more than I do. But of course, I can’t be really frank with them, or say how I begrudge not sitting and working at my real trade, writing, which would certainly improve rapidly if I gave it the nervous energy I squander on my classes.
By the way, we just opened our package of dishes from the Newton Potter’s* and found one luncheon plate split in half. I won’t pay the bill until I get a replacement of this plate. So would you help us by calling up, first asking why they didn’t say they sent parcels collect (most other shops certainly don’t charge postage for such a large order) and demand that they send along the proper plate: I could bring the pieces home in November, but am not going to spend more postage sending them now. It’s a lunch plate, next size down from dinner. Let me know the result of your calling: their order was over a month & a half late.
Ted & I looked so longingly at the farms on the hilltops here: we would like a spreading house, with a couple of apple trees, fields, a cow, and a vegetable garden, because we can’t stand city living, and don’t enjoy suburbs where neighbors children and radios impinge on the air. We are really country people, and there must be a sunny hilltop place we could buy sometime in the next 10 years. I like the hills in Hadley and Easthampton, on the other side of the river, very much.
I hope, as soon as my job ends this year, to apprentice myself to writing in earnest. Part-time dallying never got a beginner anywhere and now I don’t even have time for that, and feel my talent rusting, and it is very painful to me. We love this apartment & will probably stay here all summer no matter what we are doing next year.
Much love,
Sivvy
TO Warren Plath
Tuesday 5 November 1957
TLS (photocopy), Indiana University
Apt. 3 rear
337 Elm Street
Northampton, Mass.
Tuesday night, Nov. 5
Dearest Warren . . .
I have been very wicked not to write sooner and we loved your letters. But I’ve been in a black mood and haven’t felt like writing anybody, because I haven’t had anything particularly cheerful to share.
I’ve just now finished correcting a set of 66 papers on two Hawthorne stories I assigned and am faced with cramming for my preparation for this week’s classes which begin for me tomorrow. This coming weekend will be the first where I haven’t had a set of papers or exams to exhaust me and put me off preparing anything much for class, so I hope I can face my problems squarely and get some idea of what the hell I’m teaching. I keep feeling I could make up some good stuff out of my head to teach them about symbolism or style, but have so little time as yet, and am always deathly nervous. I must make up little brief 5 minute lectures on topics, for I am a hopeless extempore speaker. If I only knew my “subject” or was an expert, but I am struggling enough to review mere grammar & term paper forms, which bore me, alas. This week, too, I’m being “visited” by other professors which is enough to throw me into a cold twitch. I wish I were more conceited, it would be a big help.
Ted’s reviews are really amusing: every reviewer praises him in some way, although one or two british ones are reluctant: they are really grotesque: each seizes one or two or three poems & raves about them, passes off one or two others---but each raves about different poems: some say he is all music but has nothing to say (a very stupid review) some say he is all profundity, but has slack lines of rhythm. They are all rather batty.
The dominant note, however, is real praise: every review, even if it includes other books (by Marianne Moore, among others) is headed with a phrase referring to Ted. The NY Times Review by Merwin* you’ve heard of: very good, with its own picture of a hawk.* We just got a clipping from the Baltimore Sun headed “Praise For A New Poet”:* a marvelous vehement thing including the following: “The judges made a distinguished choice. Mr. Hughes’s poetic gifts are unmistakable; his work is resolved and firmly controlled. His diction is always appropriate and occasionally perfect. His only fault---and it is a minor one---is that he tends to overpower the language---to burden his lines with excessive richness.* This shortcoming however is dwarfed by the author’s rare ability to handle cosmic metaphors with accuracy and novelty . . .” & more specific praise. From the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram comes an article titled “Poetry Marked by Power, Sensibility”* which refers to Ted’s book & not to the book of Howard Moss,* the New yorker editor, which is reviewed after it & coolly reviewed. They blither enthusiastically about Ted’s versatile biography, and say: “Hughes’s poetry has been published in the Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, and Harper’s indicative of the high quality of his verse. Strength, sensibility, a feeling for words and effects mark his poetry, which is rhythmical, though not always metrical, and which uses rime sparingly. (She talks as if it were paprika!) Under the accolade of Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, Ted Hughes is off to an enviable start as a poet.”
I’ll send you more excerpts as they come in. We’re really terrifically excited about all this. An excellent review came in the British monthly Encounter.* By a don at Cambridge!* The man gives him almost two columns, quotes generously, & begins: “The most obvious thing to say about Ted Hughes is that he makes the impression of being a poet by nature and instinct. Not that this excludes at his present stage, several echoes, chiefly of Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. But the point is that a rich, even a turbulent life of feeling and observation seems to transfer itself immediately to his words, without diminution or impairment. Plenty of people have the feeling, a few have the words. The lucky ones, poetically speaking, are the very few in whom the passage between the two is open and untrammeled: (long quote)” The rest of the review is amazingly thoughtful and praising, especiall
y for the weazel-eyed Cambridge critic who just wrote a smarmy-nasty book on D. H. Lawrence.*
The anonymous Times Literary Supplement* man who finds Ted’s rhythm lacking (he just can’t read) says: “Mr. Hughes has a great deal to say. “October Dawn”, “Wind”, or the “Two Wise Generals” are good enough, particularly in a first book, to excite one’s enthusiasm, but to come upon such a poem as “Six Young Men” is thrilling and delighting, and there are other poems almost as greatly charged with humanity and compassion, and with a tenderness which never for an instant turns into sentimentality. There is a crisp and uncompromising intellectual content in the best of these poems.”
This gives you an idea. Only one man* is “nasty” & says Ted gets his ideas out of Shakespeare* or “bits of Lawrence”, & traces, falsely, echoes back to Marvell* & Chaucer* which doesn’t mean anything, but just tried to show off his own Oxford knowledge. Even this man (in England) admits “Mr. Hughes’s best poetry is original, powerful and difficult . . . his successes seem to me very impressive.”*
As you may imagine, I feel very clairvoyant: I saw all this would happen: I also saw no critic would have my omniscient appreciation, but that all would rave about the poem or poems that fitted their view: war poems, or lyric poems, or rhymed poems, or nature poems. Edwin Muir in the New Statesman & Nation* said Ted’s Jaguar poem is better than Rilke’s panther poem!* How’s that! Did we tell you Ted has got 2 new poems accepted in the Sewanee Review?
I can’t wait till June, if I live that long, to write again: for good, I hope.
I sometimes wonder if I can live out the grim looming aspect of this year without despairing. I miss not cooking & keeping up the house---Ted is an angel and makes my breakfast & lunch, but I only get a chance to make a desert on the Saturday afternoon after classes when I have one breath of freedom. I envision myself as writing in the morning & reading widely and being a writing-wife. I am simply not a career woman, and the sacrifice of energy and lifeblood I’m making for this job is all out of proportion to the good I’m doing in it. My ideal of being a good teacher, writing a book on the side, and being an entertaining homemaker, cook & wife is rapidly evaporating. I want to write first, and being kept apart from writing, from giving myself a chance to really devote myself to developing this “spectacular promise” that the literary editors write me about when they reject my stories, is really very hard.
Also, I don’t like meeting only students and teachers. That is the life here, and it is, in a way, airless. Ted & I have been hashing this over & over. We need the stimulation of people, people from various jobs & backgrounds, for writing material. And I can’t write about academics. We cast about for a place to live that wasn’t New York and thought next year of living in Boston. Ted would get a job, not anything to do with a university, and I would write in the mornings & work part-time at odd jobs which would get me into meeting queer people and give me time to sketch and really work at writing. I would like to be anonymous for a while, not the returned and inadequate heroine of the Smith campus. There is nothing worse than going back to a place where you were a success and being miserable. But I may feel better when I get more rested: at least, I am able to sleep now, and eat heartily on weekends. But this life is not the life for a writer: after I have written 20 stories and a book or two of poems, I might be able to keep up writing with work or a family, but I am needing to apprentice myself to my real trade which I hope to do next year.
I’m really wicked to run on about my problems like this, but it helps somehow to get them talked out. Every time you make a choice you have to sacrifice something, and I am sacrificing my energy, writing & versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches. If I knew how to teach a short story, or a novel, or a poem I’d at least have that joy. But I’m making it up as I go along, through trial and error, mostly error. And our classes are going to be visited by Professors off and on from now on, so I shall probably be dismissed with a sigh of relief at the end of the year. The other young instructors are very nice: there’s a young, vigorous Syrian Jew* with a psychoanalyst wife & a little boy: he’s got a Phd from Yale and is writing a novel – (although he said he got no writing done his first 2 years here); there’s a blond strange Englishman* who writes poems and animal fables and translates Sophocles for books & TV & has a degree in philosophy from Italy, and another girl, who is more or less in my situation except that she’s getting her Phd soon. Sallie Sears* is quiet, rather retiring & nervous, and worse, unmarried. This is a very poor place for an unmarried woman, as it’s full of young couples & babies. I am glad at least to know someone who gets tired & worn-out over her work: it’s easier for the men, I think, because the Smith girls respect them more, and the older women have experience & a kind of authority & expertness which carries them through. It’s Ted that really saves me. He is sorry I’m so enmeshed in this & wants me to write starting this June: being writers, not established, is difficult because you don’t just want to take routine-jobs-with-no-future for money, but professional jobs take too much training & sacrifice to make writing possible. I’m glad you’ve seen Ted’s reviews: he’s got this good one in the November issue of Encounter, a British monthly, and even the few nasties have been forced to admit that he’s a “born poet”: I’m pasting these clippings in Ted’s scrapbook & in my next letter will quote some more.
Ted gave a good reading of his poems at the NY City Poetry Center to about 150 people on Sunday October 20th and the day and night there was a pleasant change: I feel, however, I’ll be so happy not to come back to this grind of work after the year is over: every trip or movie is a kind of escape. How I long to write on my own again! When I’m describing Henry James use of metaphor to make emotional states vivid and concrete, I’m dying to be making up my own metaphors. When I hear a professor saying: “Yes, the wood is shady, but it’s a green shade---connotations of sickness, death, etc.,” I feel like throwing up my books & writing my own bad poems & bad stories and living outside the neat gray secondary air of the university. I don’t like talking about D. H. Lawrence and about critics views of him. I like reading him selfishly, for an influence on my own life & my own writing.
Ted is working on a children’s book & some poems, but I feel he’ll do better when I’m through this and happy again. I can be a good writer & an intelligent wife without being a good teacher. But the ironic thing about teaching like this is that I don’t have time to be intelligent in a fluid versatile way. I’m too nose-to-the-grindstone. The girls know I’m new at teaching & young & probably much more, & they take advantage of it, which they wouldn’t if I were really good. Eh bien.
Do write me soon. I love to hear from you. So does Ted. Forgive this rather drear letter. Unlike mother, I am a writer, not a teacher, and must work at my trade in order to be worthy of the name. Ted has a 2nd poem coming out in the NYorker: about a “Bull Frog”:* did mother tell you? Also, he’s sold 1000 books of poetry in America! He got a royalty check for about $440 but must pay some crazy 30% tax on it: we’re going to try to get legal advice about which country’s taxes to pay. Car fine. We had brakes’ repaired & lights fixed. Do write.
xx
Sivvy
TO Edith & William Hughes
Tuesday 5 November 1957
TLS, Emory University
Tuesday evening
November 5, 1957
Dear Ted’s mother and dad,
I have been thinking of you so much, every day, and the heavenly time we had with you up on the moors last year, but have only just now gotten down to writing. I’ve been so tired with my new job demands that I hadn’t even written my brother in Germany till today. I teach 4 days a week (on Wednesday to Friday), have lots of office hours to discuss papers & problems with my 66 students, and have had a great set of 66 papers or exams to correct every weekend so far, which really is work, as each paper takes about 15 or 20 minutes. This coming weekend, for the first ti
me, I’ll have no papers, so will have a chance to give my class preparation the time I need to do a good job. As I have to make up my course as I go along, I find it does take up most of my time and thought and energy, so I’ve just now gotten rested enough to get some perspective on it. I want you both to know how happy my lovely memories of The Beacon and our wonderful days, fall, winter and spring, with you both, have cheered me up as I make red marks for sentence mistakes or bad expression of ideas on the 50th or 60th paper. At this point my own sentences are rather rusty!
Ted did a wonderful job at his reading in NYC on the 20th! He looked handsome in his dark gray wool suit with the goldy-yellow Spanish tie I gave him for his birthday over a year ago, and I persuaded him to have a haircut (!) beforehand so he looked like a Yorkshire god. He read beautifully in a room of about 150 intent people who followed his reading in copies of his book which they had bought. They crowded up afterwards for autographs, and I lent Ted my shoulder for a writing desk. Has he told you he’s sold 1000 copies of this book so far? He has been getting wonderful reviews in various newspapers here, which he’ll quote to you: all praises.
You must buy the November issue of the magazine Encounter and clip out the wonderful review of Ted’s book in it (along with about 4 others)* by Graham Hough, a don at Cambridge. Isn’t it poetic justice that Ted’s former teachers & lecturers are being paid to review his work! Now he’s teaching them something. Hough’s review is very very favorable and quotes a good bit from Ted’s poems, which I think is good. Do send us copies of any articles you run across in England.
I loved the earring for my birthday! They are beautiful, all mother-ofpearl shiny, and will go perfectly with my pink knit dress which I was married in! Ted is an angel, & helps with the dishes while I’m running to and from classes, and is working on a children’s short story about a little boy’s life on the moors. I told him he loved the moors so much he should try to write a children’s story about them, instead of making up places, and he is evidently very happy doing it.