by Sylvia Plath
xxx
Sivvy & Ted*
TO Elizabeth Ames
Monday 24 August 1959
TLS, New York Public Library
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
August 24, 1959
Mrs. Elizabeth Ames
Executive Director
Yaddo
Saratoga Springs
New York
Dear Mrs. Ames:
Thank you so much for your letter.* Ted and I have just returned home from a trip, or we would have answered you sooner.
At present, my brother plans to drive us to Yaddo, so we should arrive shortly after 1 the afternoon of September 9th. We will let you know if there is any change in these plans.
If it becomes possible to arrange an extension for us we should be able to stay on until at least Thanksgiving, and perhaps into December.
Our home address, by the way, is now the Wellesley address above.
We both look forward to meeting you this fall.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO John Lehmann
Tuesday 1 September 1959
TLS, University of Texas at Austin
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
USA
September 1, 1959
Mr. John Lehmann
Editor
THE LONDON MAGAZINE
22 Charing Cross Road
London W.C.2, England
Dear Mr. Lehmann,
I am sending along to you a selection of stories---“The Wishing Box”, “The Shadow” and “This Earth Our Hospital”---in hopes that you may find something among them which pleases you.
With all good wishes, I am
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Elizabeth Ames
Saturday 5 September 1959
TLS, New York Public Library
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Mass.
September 5, 1959
Mrs. Elizabeth Ames
Yaddo
Saratoga Springs
New York
Dear Mrs. Ames:
My husband and I will be unable to come to Yaddo by car as we had hoped. As our plans stand now, we shall take a Peter Pan (Trailways) bus from Boston in the morning of the 9th, to Albany, make a bus connection there to Saratoga Springs and arrive about 5 pm. We’ll have dinner in town and arrive at Yaddo between 7:30 and 8 that evening.
With all good wishes,
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
Thursday 10 September 1959
TLS, Indiana University
Date September 10To Warren & MotherFrom MeIn re Our arrival:
It is a beautiful clouded and cool morning, 9:30 to be exact. I am sitting in my “studio” on the third (top) floor of West House (where, on the first floor, we have our large bedroom, bathroom and closet, the combination about twice as big as our Boston apartment). The house is lovely, all nooks and angles, with several studios in it. The libraries and living rooms and music rooms are like those in a castle, all old plush, curios, leather bindings, oil paintings on the walls, dark woodwork, carvings on all the furniture. Very quiet and sumptuous. I am the only person on the top floor, and my study is low-ceilinged, painted white, with a cot, a rug, a huge heavy dark-wood table that I use as a typing and writing table with piles of room for papers and books. It has a skylight and four windows on the east side that open out onto a little porch looking over gables and into tall dense green pines. The only sound is the birds, and, at night, the distant dreamlike calling of the announcer at the Saratoga racetrack. I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about 7 hours a day.
Ted has a marvelous studio* out in the woods, a regular little house to himself, all glassed in and surrounded by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, a cot, and huge desk. I am so happy we can work apart, for that is what we’ve really needed. The food so far seems to be very good. Two cups of fine coffee for breakfast, a coffee roll, eggs done to order, toast, jam, orange juice, and a great dining room---we can eat any time from 8-9. Then we pick up box lunches, two little thermoses with milk and coffee, for lunch, so we won’t be interrupted all day, and go off to work. Usually in the summer there are about 30 people here, but now there are only about 10 or 12,* mostly artists and composers (who seem very nice) and a couple of poets* we have never heard of. A magazine room has all the reviews we like, and the British magazines. There seem to be lakes full of bass, a famous rose garden, and long wood-walks, all of which we look forward to exploring.
The trip yesterday was really gruelling. There was a two-hour wait at Springfield. In Albany there was no bus running at the hour we were told it would in Boston, the station was not air-conditioned, and full of flies and tropically hot, and the Montreal bus we were to take at 4:30 only allowed passengers from New York to board, so we were put on a nonairconditioned bus and dawdled through Albany in rush hour to Saratoga Springs where we sweltered for an hour and a half waiting until we could go to Yaddo at 7:30. Once there, we were shown about the grounds and the mansion, which will close at the end of the month, but which is a magnificent castlelike affair, red carpets, fountains, plants, gilding, heavy antiques and so on.
My typewriter is marvelous. I love it. Do forward all our mail immediately to us c/o Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. We should have all sorts of things arriving---bank books, passports and so on.*
One thing: I would like some information about Austria, especially the Tyrol, for something I’m working on,* and would love it if you’d write me a descriptive letter about those places you visited: materials of the houses, furnishings, how old fashioned are they? sort of stove, any animals? colors and sorts of scenery, occupations, how children help with chores---little colored details like that---the clothes they wear and so on.
Do write us.
Love,
Sivvy
PS: In our room, you will find a large open cardboard box by my desk and the little window, on the floor. In it is a black covered thesis book which holds my poems. In either end of this, loose, there should be a copy of a poem about Boston called “A Winter’s Tale” beginning “On Boston Common a red star”.*
Could you please send it along?
xxx
s
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
c. Friday 18 September 1959*
TLS, Indiana University
Date Sept. 9 Friday,To Mother & WarrenFrom Sivvy & TedIn re odds and ends.
Dear Mother & Warren,
We’re delighted you found the film. I felt quiet sad to think the parts of our trip we did want to remember---mostly animals and fish in various combination with ourselves---might be lost for good. I wonder if it would be too much for me to ask you to send along my overshoes (grammy’s really---my pair has rips at the heel of each) as it is often very wet here, and that is the one thing I didn’t have room for in my suitcase. Ted will buy some new ones here, as he needs them.
I am sitting up in my third floor study, with the rain falling with a pleasant tattoo on the rooftops I overlook, and on my skylight. We are excellently fed here. For breakfast, orange juice (canned), eggs to order, comb-honey, jam, toast, coffee rolls, excellent coffee, bacon on Sundays. Lunches get a bit tedious, as all sandwich lunches do (except our homemade sandwiches), but there are two sandwiches, one meat, one cheese of a sort, cookies or cake, fruit and two thermoses. Dinners are of a magnificent grandeur. Roast beef, broiled chicken, ham and sweet potatoes, roast lamb, and lots of vegetables from the estate garden, a mammoth salad---cucumbers, tomatoes, fine dressings---delicious breads, cornbread, biscuits, garlic bread etc.---and peach cobbler or chocolate souffle or something marvelous for dessert. And
until the mansion closes we are eating there, all carved, heavy woods, diamond-paned windows overlooking green gardens and marble statuary, golden, deep rugs and antique velvet cushions, heavily gilt-framed paintings, statues everywhere. I love the elegance and peace of the whole mansion & shall miss it when it is shut.
Ted read some of his poems last night, and a departing novelist* read some chapters of a novel in progress---in our West House living room, which has an elegance of its own. All twelve Guests and the two hostesses* were there, and the reading went off very well. They invited us to stay till December 15th, but we think we should come home the day before Thanksgiving, so we’ll have good time to be with you and to pack.
I wonder if our bankbook from the 5¢ Savings Bank has come yet? We had left it there with a British check that needed a few days to be collected, and really would like it, because we have over $70 floating around in odd checks to be deposited. By all means leave the passport there. I’m glad the ChScience check came---they should have their billing department notified of changes of address.
Please take it easy with teaching and have the doctor give you something so you can sleep.
Love to you, Warren & Sappho,
Sivvy
TO Rachel MacKenzie*
Sunday 20 September 1959
TLS, New York Public Library
Yaddo
Saratoga Springs
New York
September 20, 1959
Miss Rachel Mackenzie
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York 36, New York
Dear Miss Mackenzie,
Howard Moss suggested* that I revise a line in A WINTER’S TALE and resubmit it this fall. I have changed the line (stanza 3, line 3)* and am sending you the poem along with two others.*
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 23 September 1959
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Yaddo
Saratoga Springs
New York
September 23, 1959
Dear mother,
Many thanks for your letter and for forwarding our mail, which has been arriving with pleasant frequency. We haven’t got our Boston 5¢ Savings Bank Book yet and are concerned about it; has it come yet? If not, do send it on right away when it does.
Where are you taking your German review course? In Wellesley or Boston?
I haven’t got the sponsor invitation yet.* Both Ted and I feel very strongly about this: we are in no position to be sponsors, to pay $20 for an event we won’t even be able to hear, and we don’t want our names on the list. Ted’s relation to Eliot is poet-to-poet and publisher-to-author, and there would be nothing “politic” about paying to have our names on a list of sponsors. I don’t remember any Mrs. Dunn,* and think there must be other people eager for the honor of sponsoring culture who have fat Wellesley purses and more desire to set themselves up as patrons. We can’t even keep our membership in the Poetry Society,* a total of $15 a year, which is just too much for our budget. Both of us hope to meet Eliot in private in England, and appreciate your offer to reimburse us, but we just don’t want to work that way. So if you want to sponsor him yourself, do, but leave us out of it. I don’t feel it much of an honor to be asked for $20 in return for use of our names. It is ridiculous and pompous for us, who need to save everything we can, to set ourselves up in any such position, and anyone with sense should realize this. Well, enough of that. Eliot probably doesn’t give a damn who is on the list: he is a fool if he does.
I have written a note to Marcia, and shall write to Mrs. Prouty, too. I read some of my poems here the other night, with a professor from the University of Chicago* who read from a novel-in-progress. Several people are leaving today, among them a very fine young Chinese composer we are very fond of, on his second Guggenheim this year. Women come here, I learned, who have families. They leave their children in camp or with relatives: a great rest for them. We get on well with the director and her secretary, and she wrote a little note that she hopes we come again before long for an even longer stay (they had invited us to stay till the 15th of December). So it is pleasant indeed to feel that this place will always be open to us. I imagine the MacDowell Colony will, too, since they sent us their application blanks, but this is obviously the finest of the three such institutions in America.* I particularly love the scenic beauty of the estate: the rose gardens, goldfish pools, marble statuary everywhere, wood walks, little lakes. Ted & I took out the estate rowboat in a very weedy little lake and caught a bass apiece Sunday, about3/4 of a pound each: not really too big, but enough for a lunch. Yet we threw them back. The food here is so fine we had no real need of fish to eat.
We had severe cold here, with frosts, but now it is warm enough to walk coatless again. We miss Sappho. We feed some of our milk to a white-pawed tiger cat here that jumped out at us from the woods, but no cat can compare to Sappho’s delicacy and breeding.
Wish you might drive up here sometime to spend an afternoon with us.
With love to you and Warren,
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
Wednesday 7 October 1959
TLS, Indiana University
Date October 7To Mother & WarrenFrom SivvyIn re
Thanks for your good letter. What is Andrew Sinclair* doing in America, studying or writing? Is Clem going to get married soon to his girl,* and has she found a job? How nice that Shirley’s* baby looks like Perry*---I thought the first one looked too much like David.*
We really don’t have any news---our life here is so secluded. We simply eat breakfast, go to our respective studios with a picnic lunch and write, read and study, then have tea, chat a bit, have dinner and read before bed. Once in a while we go into town, which is reminiscent of Northampton, as the girls’ college Skidmore (a very dull looking place) is here. And the architecture is similar: that marvelously ugly red-brick and yellow-brick 1875 style.
Ted has finished his play*---a symbolic drama based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, only set in a modern industrial community under a paternalistic ruler. I hope the Poets Theater will give it at least a reading. We have yet to type it.
I do rather miss Boston, and don’t think I could ever settle for living far from a big city full of museums and theaters. Now Mrs. Ames, the elderly Mother of Yaddo, has left for Europe, there are only her poetess secretary Polly,* a very nice woman, two painters and a composer on a Guggenheim here. From what we hear, certain artists live on these colonies almost all year: spending four months in the winter at Yaddo, then moving on to the MacDowell colony. I could never do that myself: too much like living in a vacuum. But it is nice to know that practically any time we could invite ourselves back here. It might come in convenient some day. Ted loves it and is getting a lot of work done.
Do keep us posted on all the little neighborhood news and so on.
The bankbook, by the way, should arrive at home in about three weeks. I am glad I wrote the manager a letter: they had not sent the check to the British Revenue Service for collection yet! “A change in personnel” or some such. Got a nice letter from Mrs. Prouty in answer to mine, and look forward to a dinner with her sometime between Thanksgiving and our departure.
Lots of love to you both,
Sivvy
PS: congratulations to Warren on the reading of his paper. Where will the meeting be? Too bad it’s not in California: then he could see Aunt Frieda.
TO Edith & William Hughes
c. Thursday 8 October 1959*
ALS,* British Library
Greetings! I am spending a pleasant evening reading in our large white bedroom – everything’s white-walls, beds, couches, lampshades, bureauscarves. It is like living in a great countryhouse, a fine library, fine grounds, fine cooking. Ted’s getting a great amount of work done – I am deeply i
mpressed by his play: I hope some Art Theaters will take it up – it should be exciting experimental drama. His proofs for the “Rain Horse” story* have come – a real masterpiece, not a word that could be altered, with a wonderful sense of the physical countryside – better than DH Lawrence’s descriptive stories, I think. It’s tentatively scheduled for December. Ted had his usual luck with his first prose piece – got into one of the best magazines. We went rowing on the mirror-clear lake this afternoon, all the gold leaves & white birches reflecting in the black surface. Ted caught two little bass which we threw back. I’ve been working on some short stories, have sold a few poems & drawings to the Christian Science Monitor,* which is handy money, and a longish “light” poem on Christmas in Boston to the New Yorker which pays very well. In two months, we’ll be with you! Seems hardly possible –
Love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
Tuesday 13 October 1959
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Date Oct. 13To Mummy & WarrenFrom SivvyIn re
Greetings!
As usual our main news is that we are wellfed. Every dinner seems bound to outdo the last. Last night it was juicy ham, pineapple (baked), sweet potatoes, corn, spinach, salad, hot rolls, butter, and deep dish apple pie. That’s just a sampling. After a week of solid steamy rain, we are at last having crisp, clear weather--the Green Mountains blue in the distance, the newly-fallen pine needles a resilient carpet underfoot.
TED’s proofs for his Harper’s story have come---very exciting, and it reads marvelously. It will have black-and-white drawings with it, I gather. Tentatively, it is scheduled for the December issue. We are very proud of it. It is a fine story. I hope I can hypnotize him to finish up one or two others.
