The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2
Page 138
*Since writing to ASP on 16 October, SP had completed ‘The Jailor’ (17 October) and ‘Lesbos’ (18 October).
*See George MacBeth to SP, 16 October 1962; held by BBC Written Archives Centre. ‘Berck-Plage’, The Poet’s Voice, BBC Third Programme (17 November 1962); recorded on 29 October 1962.
*A note in SP’s address book indicates Leonard Moore was at the Hotel Meurice, Bury Street, London S.W.1, 24–31 October 1962.
*Alan C. Jenkins (1912–96) and Nancy Letitia Whitaker Jenkins (née Bovill) (1916–2012). Nancy Jenkins had Susan while married to Richard O’Neill-Roe. The Jenkinses lived at ‘Pear Trees’, Belstone, near where SP took her horse-riding lessons. Alan Jenkins gave SP a signed and inscribed copy of his White Horse and Black Bulls (London: Blackie, 1960) which appeared at auction via Bonhams on 21 March 2018.
*Possibly Ted Hughes, How the Whale Became (London: Faber & Faber, 1963) and The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People (London: Faber & Faber, 1963). A third book was published the following year: Ted Hughes, Nessie and the Mannerless Monster (London: Faber & Faber, 1964).
*SP was probably replying to something in George MacBeth to SP, 14 June 1962; held by BBC Written Archives Centre.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Three Women’.
*See back of SP to ASP, 16 October 1962, #2; held by Lilly Library. ASP drafted telegram text: ‘Please see Sylvia now and get woman for her. Salary paid here. Writing.’
*Since writing to ASP on 18 October, SP had completed: ‘Stopped Dead’ (19 October); ‘Fever 103˚’ (20 October); and ‘Amnesiac’ and ‘Lyonnesse’ (21 October). ‘Amnesiac’ originally included two numbered sections. SP ultimately kept the second part and discarded the first, which was posthumously titled ‘Lyonnesse’. See SP to Howard Moss, 15 November 1962.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, the new bank manager was a Mr Daniels.
*SP may be referring to articles printed in The Guardian on 11 October 1961 and 4 May 1962 about escaped convicts.
*In an early draft of her recently completed poem ‘The Jailor’, SP wrote similar imagery: ‘That being free / Of the bell jar in which I am the dead white heron / Of the bell jar in which I turn & burn / An airless heron’. See also SP’s ‘Queen Mary’s Rose Garden’.
*SP was told ‘He is the biggest seducer in Cambridge.’ See Journals of Sylvia Plath, 213.
*SP completed her poem ‘Lesbos’ three days prior to writing this letter.
*In her 26 September letter to SP, Dr Beuscher suggested SP acquire a copy of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960). SP’s copy, with a Foyle’s sticker on front pastedown and dated 9 November 1962 in her hand, held by Emory.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, SP took care of a number of errands which may explain the two-day break in writing poems.
*Probably Munro Leaf, Ferdinandus Taurus (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962).
*Festival of Poetry, Royal Court Theatre, 15–20 July 1963. The American Poetry night was held on 16 July 1963; presented by Eric Mottram, with assistance from John Hollander and Jonathan Williams. Poets included Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, and Ronald Johnson; Guy Kingsley Poynter read from Paterson by William Carlos Williams.
*Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).
*Possibly a reference to the market town of Chagford in Devon.
*According to SP’s address book, she met British poet Patric Dickinson (1914–94) at the Savile Club, 69 Brook Street, London W.1.
*Father Michael Carey (1928–2007); 1951, Assumption College, Worcester, Mass. Carey was studying at Oxford and wrote to SP asking if she could critique his poems.
*‘hair thong (for) instead of my elastic’ appears in the original.
*SP went to Al Alvarez’s flat at 74A Fellows Road, London N.W.3.
*SP attended the English PEN party. Sylvia Plath, ‘Candles’ and ‘You’re’, New Poems 1962: A PEN Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1962): 95–7.
*SP had lunch with Peter Orr (1931–2001) of the British Council, recorded fifteen poems and gave an interview for a series titled The Poet Speaks; SP read ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, ‘Ariel’, ‘Poppies in October’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘A Secret’, ‘Cut’, ‘Stopped Dead’, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, ‘Medusa’, ‘Purdah’, ‘A Birthday Present’, ‘Amnesiac’, ‘Daddy’, and ‘Fever 103˚’.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, this was Mrs Weare. She worked on Thursdays.
*Paul Roche, Vessel of Dishonor (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1962).
*Probably Paul Roche, The Rank Obstinacy of Things: A Selection of Poems (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1962).
*Greek poet Sappho (c. 630–580 BCE); lived on the island of Lesbos.
*Since writing to ASP on 21 October, SP had completed: ‘Cut’ and ‘By Candlelight’ (24 October); and ‘The Tour’ (25 October).
*According to SP’s address book, Warren and Margaret Plath lived at 35 Banks Street, Cambridge, Mass.
*The Whites lived at 21 Alwyne Road, London N.1. Another address, in TH’s hand, appears in SP’s address book: 55 Cholmley Gardens, London N.W.6, but it is unclear when this was added.
*Albion House, 55 New Oxford Street, London W.C.1A.
*Since writing to Olive Higgins Prouty on 25 October, SP had completed: ‘Ariel’ and ‘Poppies in Ocotber’ (27 October); ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ and ‘Purdah’ (29 October); and ‘Lady Lazarus’ (23–9 October).
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, she took Nicholas to the Okehampton Eye Clinic on 20 November.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Poppies in October’, The Observer (6 October 1963): 24; and Sylvia Plath, ‘The Horse’ [‘Ariel’], The Observer (3 November 1963): 24.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Oregonian Original’, New Statesman (9 November 1962): 660; reviews of four books: E. S. Bradburne, Opal Whiteley; Evan Hunter [Ed McBain], The Wonderful Button; Leo Lionni, Little Blue and Little Yellow; and Elizabeth Rose and Gerald Rose, Punch and Judy Carry On; five other books were briefly recommended: Tomi Ungerer, The Mellops Go Flying; H. E. Bates, Achilles the Donkey; Dr Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg; Gaby Baldner, The Penguins of Penguin Town; and Reinhard Herrman, The Creation.
*Opal Whiteley, ‘The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart’, Atlantic Monthly (March 1920): 289–98. American nature writer and diarist Opal Whiteley (1897–1992).
*Installed in 1957, the plaque at 23 Fitzroy Road reads ‘William / Butler / YEATS / 1865–1939 / Irish poet / and dramatist / lived here’.
*Since writing to Olive Higgins Prouty on 2 November, SP had completed: ‘The Couriers’ (4 November); ‘Getting There’, ‘The Night Dances’, and ‘Gulliver’ (6 November).
*Winkleigh.
*The Pierpont Morgan Library holds a typescript carbon letter from W. S. Merwin to SP, 5 November 1962. Merwin’s is a response to a letter from SP written c. 31 October–1 November. The location of this letter is unknown. We can infer that SP asked Merwin to participate in the American Poetry night at the Festival of Poetry, Royal Court Theatre.
*‘cannot believe’ appears in the original.
*In his letter Merwin writes, ‘if there’s some way I can help please tell me what it is’ and ‘Let me know if I can do something to help.’
*See Eric Walter White to SP, 6 November 1962; held by McMaster University. The letter came to SP care of the Poetry Book Society. It is possible the letter was in regard to SP being asked to be one of three judges of the Guinness Poetry competition, which was announced the day after SP’s death in ‘Cheltenham Festival of Literature’, Financial Times (12 February 1963): 22. The other two judges were Jon Silkin and Edward Lucie-Smith. SP was not replaced with a third judge. See SP to ASP, 21 December 1962.
*Howard Moss to SP, 7 November 1962; held by Smith College. Moss rejected ‘Poppies in October’, ‘Ariel’, and ‘Purdah’.
*Sylvia Plath, �
�Lyonnesse’. See also note on ‘Amnesiac’ and ‘Lyonnesse’ with SP to ASP, 21 October 1962, above.
*SP sent: ‘Fever 103°’, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, ‘Purdah’, ‘A Birthday Present’, ‘The Jailor’, ‘The Detective’, ‘The Courage of Quietness’ [‘The Courage of Shutting-Up’], ‘Lesbos’, ‘Eavesdropper’, and the five bee poems.
*See SP to Douglas Cleverdon, 19 November 1962.
*Since writing to Olive Higgins Prouty on 2 November, SP had completed: ‘Thalidomide’ (8 November); ‘Letter in November’ (11 November); ‘Death & Co.’ (14 November); ‘Years’ and ‘The Fearful’ (16 November); and ‘Mary’s Song’ (19 November). ‘Death & Co.’ was the last poem SP wrote which was to be included in Ariel, her second volume of poetry.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, she visited St Ives on 13 November.
*English publisher and politician Mark Bonham Carter (1922–94); married Leslie Nast in 1955.
*W. B. Yeats, The Unicorn from the Stars: Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1953); SP’s copy held by Smith College with the passage underlined, starred, and annotated: ‘Nov. 13, 1962 The prophecy – True?’ Yeats’s text reads: ‘Go, then, get food and drink, whatever is wanted to give you strength and courage. Gather your people together here, bring them all in. We have a great thing to do, I have to begin—I want to tell it to the whole world. Bring them in, bring them in, I will make the house ready’ (347).
*See Winifred Davies to ASP, 3 November 1962; held by Lilly Library.
*SP probably meant Regent’s Park Road.
*William Joseph Rawlings (1903–70), a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
*Nest Cleverdon (1920–2003), Douglas Cleverdon’s wife.
*Probably Francis Cleverdon (1960– ).
*British poet and novelist Stevie Smith (1902–71); see Stevie Smith to SP, 22 November 1962; held by Smith College.
*Recorded 12 June 1961.
*Stevie Smith, 1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green, London N.13.
*Stevie Smith, A Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). TH gave SP a copy of Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning (London: Andre Deutsch, 1958) for Christmas 1960, which appeared at auction via Bonhams on 21 March 2018.
*SP drafted much of The Bell Jar on pink Smith College Memorandum paper.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Mushrooms’ and ‘Morning Song’, John Wain (ed.), Anthology of Modern Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1963): 68–70, 91. See A. Tarcy, Sound News Productions, to Heinemann, 1 November 1962; W. Roger Smith to SP, 5 November 1962; and Smith to Tarcy, 21 November 1962; held by Random House Group Archive & Library. ‘Mushrooms’ does not appear to have been used in the sound recording.
*BBC producer Leonie Cohn (c. 1917–2009).
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Landscape of Childhood’. Posthumously titled ‘Ocean 1212–W’; read by June Tobin for Writers on Themselves, BBC Home Service (19 August 1963); printed in The Listener (29 August 1963): 312–13.
*The enclosure is no longer with the letter.
*See Sheila Grant to SP, 30 November 1962; held by BBC Written Archives Centre.
*SP visited Ireland in September, not August. She repeated this mistake in several subsequent letters.
*The clipping is now held by Lilly Library. SP drew stars by the title and her name; Prouty added pencil annotations.
*SP’s review of Elizabeth & Gerald Rose, The Big River, quoted in The Observer (17 June 1962): 27; ‘“A clear, poetic account of a river’s genesis and progress to the sea, with superb illustrations”—Sylvia Plath, New Statesman’.
*SP’s review of Wanda Gág, The Funny Thing, quoted on rear jacket flap of Wanda Gág, The ABC Bunny (London: Faber & Faber, 1962): ‘“An excellent read-aloud adventure for very young children . . . all the finality of a good fable.” New Statesman’.
*British politician and diarist Violet Bonham Carter, Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, DBE (1887–1969).
*Ruth Fainlight, ‘Mist’, Cages (London: Macmillan, 1966): 8.
*By the time it was published in Cages, Fainlight had changed ‘Mind’s heedless gliding to the final sea’ to ‘That heedless gliding by one firm act of art’.
*HM Prison Dartmoor is near Princetown, Devon, approximately twenty-three miles from North Tawton. Two men escaped the prison on 14 November 1962, and were captured the day before this letter was written.
*English politician and poet Thomas Wyatt (1503–42).
*American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885–1972).
*Probably Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953). TH’s copy held by Emory University.
*SP might be referring to poem 38 ‘To what serves Mortal Beauty?’ in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, cited above. According to editor W. H. Gardner’s note, poem 38 includes ‘common rhythm highly stressed’ (232). SP quotes the first lines of poem 7 ‘God’s Grandeur’ and poem 36 ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Hopkins in her Journals (24 January 1953: 164).
*When ASP sold SP’s papers to Indiana in 1977, this letter and the one to ASP of 23 September 1962 were placed under seal.
*Sylvia Plath, ‘Suffering Angel’, New Statesman (7 December 1962): 828–9; review of Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (London: Macdonald, 1962).
*‘Now . . . to me immediately’: These sentences, comprising four and a half lines in the original letter, were redacted by ASP in black ink either at the time the letters were being prepared for Letters Home or during the sale to the Lilly Library in 1977. ASP added a note in pen: ‘Personal & to me only! asp’. It has been possible to transcribe some of the redaction because of fading ink, as well as using UV light on the original and through manipulation of a scan of the letter in Photoshop. Some text remains obscured. According to the London Wills and Probates records, at the time of her death, SP had £2,147 4s. 2d. in her bank account. Issued to TH on 22 May 1963.
*British poet Susan Alliston Moore. Moore worked as a secretary for Faber & Faber; see Susan Moore to SP, 4 February 1963; held by Smith College.
*This sentence redacted by ASP.
*This sentence redacted by ASP.
*Date supplied from internal evidence.
*According to SP’s Letts Royal Office Diary Tablet for 1962, SP hosted the dinner on 27 November.
*Frederick Gilbert Foster (1920–2000), his wife Marian Robley Foster (1932– ) and their three children: Aidan (1957– ); Gerald (1958– ); and Bride (1961– ). At the time Marian Foster was pregnant with her fourth child, Rona (1963– ). According to SP’s address book, the Fosters lived at Park View, North Tawton.
*Probably John Somerville of Bedwell Community Association, Stevenage, who is listed in SP’s address book.
*Corin Hughes-Stanton (1933– ). Hughes-Stanton lived at 2 Willes Road, off Prince of Wales Road, London N.W.5.
*According to SP’s address book, Neville-Davies lived at 40 Beak Street, London W.1.
*Reviews appeared in The Guardian on 23 November and The Observer on 25 November.
*Karl Miller; see SP to Karl Miller, 29 November 1962 (draft).
*Thoor Ballylee Castle, Ballylee, Gort, County Galway.
*SP’s second draft of ‘Kindness’ (1 February 1963) was later typed on the verso of this draft letter to Miller. An annotated typescript of SP’s long review of the British edition of Malcolm Elwin’s biography of Lady Byron (Anne Isabella Milbanke Byron) is held by Smith College.