by Sylvia Plath
I have just sold a long poem about our Elm tree to the New Yorker for $156, very encouraging. Since my contract with them, they buy a good many of my poems. I also am scheduled to record a long one for the BBC this month. Miraculously, and like some gift, my writing has leapt ahead and not deserted me in this hour of need. I have devotion to it---what else but my babies could get me up at 4 in the morning! I have, too, great joy in my work. I hope to have a second book of poems ready soon, and a second novel written by the end of the winter if I am lucky in finding a suitable woman or girl to help with the children and cooking. Do reassure mother about my state of mind. It is only my rather wasted physique that needs building up, & that is simple enough, given my optimism and happy spirit. I go horseback riding---learning---each week & it is a great pleasure. Do write. I love your letters.
Warmest love to you & Taupe,
Sylvia
TO Warren Plath
Thursday 18 October 1962
TLS (aerogramme, photocopy), Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Thursday: October 18
Dear Warren,
Your welcome letter arrived today, together with a very sweet and moving letter from Clem. I am writing him in the same mail as this. I certainly want to see his father. As it happens, the BBC have just taken a long gruesome poem of mine, so I can go up to record it during his stay, expenses paid, & a good local temporary nanny is imminent, thanks to the efforts of blessed Winifred Davies, our midwife. I have a horror now (don’t tell mother) whom I shall fire tomorrow---she is a snobby snoopy old bitch & has upset my faithful cleaner Nancy & the babies & me & is terribly expensive. I got her from the same agency as my young dream-nanny who came while I was in Ireland & have resolved never to get someone sight unseen again. Ted’s fantastic thoughtlessness, almost diabolic---he keeps saying he can’t understand why I don’t kill myself, it would be so convenient, & has certainly tried to make life hell enough---has set me back a year or two in my own life. I know just what I need, what I want, what I must work for. Please convince mother of this. She identifies much too much with me, & you must help her see how starting my own life in the most difficult place---here, not running, is the only sane thing to do. I love England, love Court Green for summers, want to live in London in fall & winter so the children can go to the fine free schools & I can have the free lance jobs & cultural variety & stimulus which is food for my year-long culture-starved soul.
I fear I wrote two worrying letters to mother this week when I was desperate at hearing the “Hughes position”, which is that I am bloody lucky to have a house & car & to be able to “earn my own living” (I can just about earn the “extras”---a nanny, Ted’s high life insurance & the car insurance & gas), & of course not to expect a penny from Ted. This cheery letter came just as I had a recurrence of my old flu fever & chills & weakness, and I was terrified that as soon as they hear from Ted he has said he would pledge £1,000 a year (a fortune to them, although he can now earn twice & thrice that at the turn of a finger) to cover our very basic running expenses---taxes, heat, light, food, clothes for the children (nothing for me)---that they would descend, the charming Olwyn in advance, & literally try to do me in. The most sordid thing is Ted’s playing on my nervous breakdown, & telling me how convenient it would be if I were dead. I think he actually counted on my committing suicide. The poor husband---the 3rd---of this charming woman, did try to commit suicide, because he honestly loved & admired Ted, was a minor poet too, & to Ted this was only sauce. Do try to convince mother I am cured. I am only in danger physically, mentally I am sound, fine & writing the best ever, free from the long cow-sludge of domesticity from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. each day. I did not tell mother that I almost died from influenza, that is why I begged to see Maggie. I thought a loving humane sister-in-law whom I already love dearly, would protect me from further assaults while I got back my weight, my health. But now I am better & if this local nanny comes through & covers my trip to Ireland I should be safe, for a while.
I shall certainly see Clem’s father. I am in a very difficult position as Ted can earn large & indefinite amounts & not report half of them---thousands of $ for ms. sales alone. Legally I am only entitled to 1/3 of his income, less if I have the house, & if I earn anything, I am penalized, for then it becomes 1/3 of our combined incomes. If he doesn’t pay, I have the long tedium of suing. He is, I now see, fully indulging the bastard & killer in him & his fantastic hatred & sadism toward me & Nick is probably the result of resentment at having led 6 years of good, kind faithful behavior. He evidently meant to secretly, suddenly & completely desert us without money or access to him, or support, thinking, it now appears, that we could live here on potatoes & apples. I want a clean, quick divorce. He says he will dock any legal expenses from the money he pledged us! I think when his family masses behind him, I shall have to face yearly suing. I am a writer & that is all I want to do. Over here I can earn quite a bit from the radio, live on little, get free medical care, & have had my 1st novel accepted (this is a secret, it is a pot-boiler & no-one must read it!) & am ready to finish a 2nd the minute I get a live-in nanny. I plan to have the “long” room done over this winter (the cottage has been ordered demolished by the health inspector!) as a bed-sitter with TV & invest in a “permanent nanny” when I return from Ireland in March. I must have someone live in, or otherwise I don’t eat & can go nowhere. By next fall I hope to have earned & written my way to a flat in London where my starved mind can thrive & grow. My God, Warren, imagine yourself on an endless potato farm forever deprived of your computers, friends, relatives & only potato people in sight. I am an intellectual at heart---this will be a fine summer house for the children, but the schools are awful, they must go to school in London. Do reassure mother. I hope my new nanny will want to manage Ireland.
xxx
sivvy
PS: Please try to keep writing me too! I live on letters & have no other source of contact with relatives & friends just now! Even a paragraph from you is a great tonic!
TO Clarissa Roche
Friday 19 October 1962
TLS, Smith College
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 19: Friday
Dearest Clarissa,
You have no idea how much your sweet letter meant to me, which came today. I congratulate you on the new baby, and if she takes after the others & you she will be a blond lucky goddess. I’m so glad you heard the baby-borning program*---I’d never been in a maternity ward except to see someone’s else’s baby born, but a stay in hospital after I had my appendix out gave me the atmosphere.
What I say next may come as a bit of a shock. Since I last wrote you I am having to divorce Ted. He has, in effect, deserted me and the children, saying he never had courage to tell me he didn’t want them until we had two. I loved London life & did not want to leave---coming to the country was his idea, his “dream”, as he said. I guess he thought we could live on potatoes & apples. The fact that he left the week after I almost died of influenza last month, & that his family does not want him to support us in any way, is just one step, I guess, in the path of poetic genius. Needless to say, I would just adore to see you & Paul. I am at present totally without access to friend or relative and have been stupidly ill, lost a lot of weight & am running a flickery 103° fever, getting up each morning at 4 a.m. to write, my one quiet time.
My one main problem is to find a loyal live-in girl who can baby mind & cook breakfasts & teas while I write. I am having to get rid of a ghastly snoopy scabby senile agency nanny tomorrow who has almost scared the babes out their wits in 2 days, but hope next week to have the help by day of a pretty nurse for the six weeks before she goes up to London to be a staff nurse there. I have a double bedroom that will be free when she goes on a holiday for a week in mid-November. Could you come then? There’s a carry-cot here
for the babe, a Bendix for nappies & a huge welcome for you both.
Perhaps you can imagine what it’s like for a sociable city intellectual like me, dying to write, read, see places, plays, people etc. to be stuck among cows, cow people, without an adult to speak to; and now that Ted is earning fabulous sums, without baby shoe money. I am hoping to go for a rest-cure to Ireland with the babes by the sea near Galway to get back my flesh & try to finish a novel in December through early March. Do you know anyone who would like to rent a big beautiful farmhouse with Wilton carpets, 2 double bedrooms, a babies room, a huge sunny playroom, a Bendix, fridge, all shops in 2 minutes, garden, seclusion, 4 hours from Waterloo by the town station at a low rent for 3 winter months? Or starting next fall? Next fall, I hope to write my way back to a London flat & keep this place for summers, but that is as yet a dream. My dream. But that’s the dream I want to live in. As soon as I know the nurse’s holiday week I’ll let you know, but please do write & say you’ll try to come then, mid-November. I love you both dearly & would be heartbroken to miss you!
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 21 October 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Sunday: October 21
Dear mother,
Will you please, for goodness sake, stop bothering poor Winifred Davies! You have absolutely no right or reason to do this, and it is an endless embarrassment to me. She is busier than either you or I, and is helping me as much as she can and knows and sees my situation much better than you do. It was incredibly foolish of you to send her a telegram---she came over this afternoon and said you sent her some wire to tell me to “keep the nanny” & “the salary would be paid from over there” etc.* Will you kindly leave her out of it? Why didn’t you wire me? And to imply that money is available from over in America is the worst thing you could do---it completely falsifies my hard-up predicament, everybody thinks Americans are rich and my problems are magnified. I can’t see how you could be so silly! Just like telling them I had a nervous breakdown when I have a fantastic job to get this stupid doctor to admit I have a fever even when he takes it on his office thermometer. This is one of the reasons I find your presence so difficult. These absolutely scatty things! My business in this town is my business, & for goodness sake learn to keep your mouth shut about it. Winifred knows the nanny I had was atrocious---an old bitch, the children were shrieking in terror the whole time she was here, & I had to take over poor Nicholas completely, she yelled at him so, & even my serene Nancy was almost hysterical after the woman was at her for a morning. I sent her back Saturday morning, after my fever went up to 103° again. You have no idea what you are saying when you blithely talk about “hiring nannies.” No nanny wants to live out here in the middle of nowhere, without Tv* or amusement. And I shall never again hire a woman without an interview. It is ridiculous. Winifred has got me a young nurse to come in days for about the next six weeks. I should be able to calm down & do some work & sit & think. I have got to get a flat in London by next fall, or I shall go stir crazy.
*I shall rent a set next spring when I get the room made over.
I cannot understand Ted’s insanity & irresponsibility, sticking me down here, in an unsellable, unrentable huge house with grounds needing a full-time gardener, no nannies available, no culture, no people, nothing, then congratulating himself on deserting us with “a house and car”. It is as if, out of revenge for my brain & creative power, he wanted to stick me where I would have no chance to use it. I think now my creating babies & a novel frightened him---for he wants barren women like his sister & this woman, who can write nothing, only adore his stuff. I love Court Green & will find it a wonderful summer retreat. I am even enjoying my rather frustrating (culturally & humanly) exile now. I am doing a poem a morning, great things,* and as soon as the nurse settles, shall try to draft this terrific second novel that I’m dying to do. Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen---physical or psychological---wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced & go through hell, that to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies’ Home Journal blither about those.
Please do understand that while I am very very grateful indeed for financial help from people who have money, like Mrs. Prouty & Dot, & while I should be glad for the odd Birthday & Xmas present from you, I want no monthly dole, especially not from you. You can help me best by saving your money for your own retirement. I am just furious at Ted, putting me in this intolerable position. If I had lots of money, I’d just buy my way out. I know just what I want & want to do. I made a roast beef potato & corn dinner, with apple cake today, had the bank manager’s* handsome 14 year-old son & a schoolfriend in---they’d had Ted’s poems in class. They were charming. I dearly love the people I know in town, but they are no life. I am itching for museums, language study, intellectual & artistic friends. I am well-liked here, in spite of my weirdness, I think, though of course everybody eventually comes round to “Where is Mr. Hughes.” I hate Ted with a passion. Years of my life wasted while he knew, even in London, what he was going to do! I am appalled. If only I could earn enough to buy myself into a London flat! I have so much writing in me, the children are a kind of torture when on my neck all day. If I get a good girl, a good nanny, permanent, I can have my own life too. I adore the babies & am glad to have them, even though now they make my life fantastically difficult. If I can just financially get through this year, I should have time to get a good nanny, & even a London flat. The worst difficulty is that Ted is at the peak of his fame & all his friends are the one’s who employ me. But I can manage that too. Had a lovely afternoon out with the children, mowing the lawn, Frieda playing with the cats & a stick & Nick laughing wildly at them all. He is a sunshine; Frieda gets awfully whiney, but that is because of the big changes. Let me know roughly when & for how long Warren & Maggie can come next spring, so I can start planning a rota of guests!
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Sunday 21 October 1962
TLS, Smith College
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 21, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
Since I last wrote you, everything has blown up, blown apart, and settled in new and startling places. I wrote you in a state of crisis---when Ted’s poems told me what he hadn’t the guts to tell me and had lied blue to keep me from knowing, that he was madly in love with another woman & will probably become her 4th husband. What has astounded me is my reaction to his departure---for good, last week, and to my decision to get a divorce as fast as I can. I felt the most fantastic exhilaration & relief. I understand now what you meant about being in my own womb, my own primal cave. I was so far gone in I was cow-dumb. In the last 3 years I have produced & nursed for 10 & 6 months respectively, two children, had a miscarriage, and been so intrigued & delighted by my bodily processes & infants I have been out for the count. Also, my relation to Ted was in many, many ways, gravely regressed, more & more I was calling on him to be a father & hating myself for it. After I drove him to the station with his things, I returned to the empty house expecting to be morbid and huge with gloom. I was ecstatic. My life, my sense of identity, seemed to be flying back to me from all quarters, buried hidden places. I knew what I wanted to do, pretty much who I was, where I wanted to go, who I wanted see, even just how, when I get to a good London haircutter, I wanted to do my weird hair. I was my own woman.
My sex confidence suffered a hard blow---it is not easy to face a gossipy professional world in which my husband’s best friends are my employers and know they all know I have been deserted and for whom and under what conditions. But I go up to record a long poem for the BBC next week & will start announcing the
divorce. I am happy about it, very very happy & this will come through. I have enough energy to manage fallout, escaped Dartmoor convicts,* etc. for a lifetime. All during my 6 years of marriage I wondered what to write about, my poems seemed to me like fantastical stuffed birds under bell jars.* Now I get up at 4 a.m. every morning when my sleeping pill wears off & write like fury till 8, stuffing the babes with rusks & juice. I am doing a poem a day, all marvelous, free, full songs. Every thing I read about, hear, see, experience or have experienced is on tap, like a wonderful drink. I can use everything. I think my marriage, though it had much good, was a pretty sick one.
Ted has reverted to pretty much what he was when I met him---“the greatest seducer in Cambridge”,* only now it is “the world”, he wants to be an “international catalyst”. Even in love with this barren ad agency writer who commands a huge salary & puts it all on her back, he picks up Finns in coffee bars & takes them to hotels---he & this Assia are such a perfect match I laugh in my guts when I think of them married. They look exactly alike: the same color, shape, everything. She is his twin sister, & like his sister, barren, uncreative, a real vamp. All sophistication. They smoke (Ted, a nonsmoker, has been desperately practising) & drop names of the opposite sex, to titillate each other. They will be elaborately unfaithful to each other, very rich, & have no children, I presume, if her 2 abortions & 4 miscarriages can let me have this satisfaction.
I suppose it will be hell for me to meet them together at my first party or literary affair. But I will. Oddly, I think some day she & I may be friends, not friends, but speaking. Ted says she has got my book out of the library, adores my work, etc. etc., & although both of them behaved like bitch & bastard in this, she at least had the guts to tell her husband at the end how serious things were. Ted had planned to simply desert me, without address, without money & without explanation. His stay here before the final departure almost killed me. I have never felt such hate. He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money & Frieda, told me I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love he had never told me, and even two years ago he had not wanted to live with me. I was aghast at this last---why then, stick me in Devon (his “dream”) in a huge house with grounds needing a full-time gardener, away from all culture, movies, plays, art shows, museums, libraries, brainy & smart people, with two babies, then desert and cut off the money! Why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged! It will be at least a year before I can muster a flat in London---I love living there, all the good free schools & the best doctors are there, and the people, the events I want. He told me in London it was death to him, got me down here hand-hemming curtains & painting furniture for a year hoping to see him radiant with what he wanted, & he seemed to be, then pouf! Two years of hypocrisy, just waiting for the right bed to fall in? I can’t believe it. It just seems insane to me.
