The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2 Read online

  Comprehensive factual and supporting footnotes are provided. These annotations aim to bring context to Plath’s life; her experiences, her publication history and that of Ted Hughes, cultural events, and her education and interests. Significant places, family, friends and professional contacts are identified at their first mention. Where possible, the footnotes supply referential information about the letters to which Plath was responding, as well as the locations for books from her personal library and papers written for her university courses. We made use of Plath’s early diaries, adult journals, scrapbooks, and personal calendars to offer additional biographical information in order to supply, for instance, dates of production for her creative writing.

  An extensive index completes the publication and serves as an additional reference guide. The adult names of Plath’s female friends and acquaintances are used, but the index also includes cross references to their birth names and other married names.

  As we read, edited, and annotated the letters initially available to us, we kept a running list of all the other letters Plath mentioned writing, which number more than 700. Some letters were destroyed, lost or not retained, such as those to Eddie Cohen and to boyfriends Richard Sassoon and Richard Norton. Other letters are presumed to remain in private hands, such as a postcard sent from McLean Hospital in December 1953, which was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in 1982. Plath wrote letters and notes to many other acquaintances, Smith classmates, publishers, teachers, and mentors, as well as to family friends. We attempted to contact many of these recipients; a majority of these requests went unanswered. Those who did respond yielded some positive results. After this edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath is published, additional letters that are discovered may be gathered for subsequent publication.

  Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

  2018

  Introduction

  Over the past five years, we have scoured the archives of Sylvia Plath’s family, friends, and professional contacts assembling as many letters as possible so that Plath may tell her own story in her own words at her own pace. While Sylvia Plath’s letters in Volume I (1940–1956) reveal her full-throttled embrace of life and the extraordinary talents, ambition, love, and dreams that she brought to the beginning of her marriage to Ted Hughes, Volume II (1956–1963) provides a detailed portrait of their marriage and continues the saga of Plath’s life to its tragic conclusion. There are 575 letters to 108 recipients in Volume II, written between 1956 and 1963. They begin on 28 October 1956, the day after Plath’s twenty-fourth birthday on which Hughes gives her ‘a lovely Tarot pack of cards’, and end on 4 February 1963, a week before Plath’s death at the age of thirty.

  Plath’s voluminous letters to her mother form the backbone of the narrative. There are 230 letters to Aurelia Plath in this volume, chronicling Plath’s last year at the University of Cambridge as a married woman (1956–7), vacationing with Hughes at Cape Cod (summer 1957), teaching at Smith College and living together in Northampton, Massachusetts (August 1957–August 1958), pooling their savings to live in Boston and write full-time (September 1958–June 1959), travelling across North America to California (summer 1959), residing at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York (autumn 1959), and finally settling in England (December 1959–February 1963). Only bits and pieces of these letters were published in 1975 by Aurelia Plath in Letters Home whereas every extant readable word Plath sent to her mother has been included in this edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Plath’s almost weekly letters to her mother are generally upbeat and focused on practical matters since Plath knew that her mother had difficulty handling her darker moods. Plath was much more honest with her brother, Warren. When he is in Germany on a Fulbright fellowship in 1957, Plath admits she is in a ‘black mood’ because her ‘ideal of being a good teacher, writing a book on the side, and being an entertaining homemaker, cook & wife is rapidly evaporating’ (5 November 1957). After teaching for a year at Smith College she decides that an academic career ‘is Death to writing’ and devotes herself to creative writing for the rest of her life (28 November 1957).

  There are twenty-six previously unpublished letters to Hughes’s parents in Yorkshire. Plath often writes in British style. She is clearly trying to impress her new in-laws by showcasing the literary accomplishments of her husband as well as herself. Many letters are written jointly, but Ted Hughes’s contributions are not transcribed in this edition at the request of his copyright holder, although paraphrases are occasionally included in footnotes. Plath is particularly thrilled when she and Hughes are published together for the first time in Granta (5 May 1957). ‘Isn’t it poetic justice’, she later tells her in-laws who knew their son was considered a wild ruffian at Cambridge, ‘that Ted’s former teachers & lecturers are being paid to review his work!’ (5 November 1957). Plath is proud of her role in launching Hughes’s career when she writes to her sister-in-law, Olwyn Hughes, on 9 February 1958: ‘How does it feel to have a great and burgeoning poet for a brother?’ Plath is also quick to tell the family when she sells her own ‘two longest poems to The New Yorker’ (30 June 1958) or when Hughes wins honours like the Guinness Poetry Award for ‘The Thought-Fox’ (18 September 1958), the Somerset Maugham Award for the Hawk in the Rain (24 March 1960), and the Hawthornden Prize for Lupercal (27 March 1961). She tells Gerald Hughes in Australia that his younger brother ‘is appearing, it seems, in print every week in England’ (13 August 1958). The letters provide detailed information about Ted Hughes’s early publications in addition to her own. When their ‘rosebud’ of a daughter is born, Plath tells Olwyn that ‘Ted’s hypnosis, I am sure, made this unusual first labor possible’ (2 April 1960). She also regales Olwyn with some of the literary invitations they receive, such as ‘cocktails with Auden at Fabers’ (16 May 1960), and is pleased with a ‘spate of rave reviews’ of her own poetry in the Observer, the New Statesman, and over the BBC (1 January 1961). But Olwyn, who according to Ted is jealous of Sylvia, calls Plath a ‘nasty bitch’ one Christmas in Yorkshire causing a permanent rift in the family. Plath tells her mother: ‘Olwyn made such a painful scene this year that I can never stay under the same roof with her again’ (1 January 1961).

  Some of Plath’s close classmates from Smith College, including Marcia Brown Stern and Ann Davidow-Goodman, receive very candid letters about the new stages in Plath’s adult life, from marriage and motherhood to Plath’s heartbreak over her husband’s infidelity and her plans for divorce. During Plath’s last semester as ‘the only married undergraduate, woman in Cambridge’, she is able to keep house and complete all her academic requirements at the same time – to ‘cook and cogitate’ as she tells Marcia on 15 December 1956. As a supplement to her exams, she even plans to turn in ‘a book of poems’. Occasionally, Plath is filled with confidence about ‘being a triple-threat woman: wife, writer & teacher (to be swapped later for motherhood, I hope)’ (9 April 1957). Plath tells Marcia that she plans to have Frieda Rebecca Hughes at home in London with the help of a midwife: ‘[I] am taking this chance to have the baby perfectly free after paying to make sure of conceiving it!’ (8 February 1960). Hughes adores Frieda and is continually marvelling ‘how beautiful she is’ (11 May 1960). ‘Her eyes are so blue they send out sparks’ (21 May 1960). Plath admits to fellow American poet Lynne Lawner, that ‘the whole experience of birth and baby seem much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage’ (30 September 1960).

  Plath’s focus, drive, and ambition for the success of her writing and that of Hughes are astounding in this second volume of letters. For any novice writer, these letters provide a stunning blueprint of the talent and dedication required to succeed. Plath types Hughes’s poetry and her own and submits their work to magazines, keeping ‘20 manuscripts out continually from both of us’ (7 March 1957). Serving as Hughes’s secretary and American literary agent, she arranges his book manuscripts and submits them to literary contests, such as ‘a first-book-of-poems contest run by Harper’s publishing company’, whi
ch Hughes later wins (21 November 1956). The Hawk in the Rain launches his career and is dedicated to Plath. When Plath met Hughes, she guaranteed him ‘15 poems sold in a year if he let me be his agent’. On the day that Faber & Faber accepts Hughes’s poetry book for publication in Britain, Plath brags to her mother that true to her promise: ‘Ted has sold 14 poems, a broadcast poem & a book to two countries’ in the past year (10 May 1957). Hawk in the Rain wins the Poetry Society choice for autumn 1957, which guarantees, as Plath tells Lynne Lawner, ‘a sale of 800 copies, close to miraculous in England’ (1 July 1957). But in order for their poetry to earn as much money as possible, Plath realizes that Hughes’s next book, Lupercal, ‘will be made up only after all the poems in it are already sold to magazines’ (19 March 1957). Plath tells her brother that ‘Ted has the makings of a great poet’, and he also has the loyal support of Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot (11 June 1958). Throughout her life, no matter the circumstance, Plath never wavers in her assessment of Hughes as a genius of a writer. However, part of the couple’s success as poets is their influence on each other. Plath tells Warren: ‘we are extremely critical of each other, & won’t let poems pass’ before each word, image, and rhythm is examined (25 June 1958). As Hughes becomes more famous, Plath’s creative writing time is occupied in answering his ‘voluminous correspondence’ (21 May 1960). She tells her mother on 22 April 1961: ‘It is so marvelous having married Ted with no money & nothing in print & then having all my best intuitions prove true!’

  Plath’s publishing success is more gradual and her evolving philosophy of writing is clearly articulated in her letters. Her first poetry book is not published until 1960. She submits her poetry manuscript under three different titles to the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest without success. She finally starts weeding out her early poems as ‘too romantic, sentimental & frivolous & immature’ and tells her brother on 11 June 1958, ‘my main difficulty has been overcoming a clever, too brittle & glossy feminine tone, & I am gradually getting to speak “straight out” and of real experience, not just metaphorical conceits’. She becomes attracted to more ‘ugly’ topics and tells Ann Davidow-Goodman that she slowly writes poems about ‘cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes’ (12 June 1959). Plath explores all kinds of publishing options for The Colossus (the seventh title for her book), including the World Publishing Company, before Heinemann in London (18 February 1960) and Knopf in New York (1 May 1961) accept her revised manuscript. Marianne Moore is critical of The Colossus. Plath responds to Judith Jones at Knopf: ‘I am sorry Miss Moore eschews the dark side of life to the extent that she feels neither good nor enjoyable poetry can be made out of it’ (5 September 1962). Other poets are more supportive. Behind the scenes, W. S. Merwin arranges for Plath to receive a ‘first reading’ contract from the New Yorker (26 February 1961) and loans Plath his study in London where she eventually writes The Bell Jar, ‘a novel about a college girl building up for and going through a nervous breakdown’ (17 April 1961). Plath’s poem ‘Insomniac’ wins the 1961 Guinness Poetry Award and first prize at the 1961 Cheltenham Festival of Art and Literature. Plath is asked to be a judge for subsequent Guinness and Cheltenham contests and champions upcoming American writers throughout her career.

  The poetry of Plath and Hughes is different, and in some cases disturbing, compared to the ‘new movement poetry’ popular at the time. Even Plath’s early poems, such as ‘Spinster’, which appears in the new Oxford–Cambridge magazine Gemini, is reviewed as ‘sharp-edged’ (18 March 1957). But it takes dogged determination in the early days of their writing careers to be published: ‘We still get on an average two rejections apiece to every acceptance’ (13 April 1957). The New Yorker rejects Hughes’s signature poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ a year before they accept it and finally, after ten years of rejections, Plath wins her own first coveted acceptance by the magazine in June 1958. Even on their cross-America camping trip during the summer of 1959, Plath asks her mother to ‘make a chart of all poems accepted’ and send a carbon of it to Frieda Heinrichs, Plath’s aunt, who lives at their ultimate destination in California (12 July 1959). ‘You need to develop a little of our callousness and brazenness’, she continues, ‘to be a proper sender-out of mss’ (2 August 1959). Once the quality of their poetry is recognized they are quickly anthologized. Oscar Williams includes Hughes in the 1958 revised edition of the Pocket Book of Modern Verse, which begins with Walt Whitman and ends with Hughes. Williams also introduces Plath and Hughes to all the publishers in New York City, including the editor of the Hudson Review, who later publishes their poetry. They both have poems included in the annual British PEN and Borestone anthologies (11 June 1958). Because Plath lives in England and is married to an Englishman, she is even included in the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse 1918–60, an anthology of modern British poetry (1 January 1961), as well as the following year in New Poets of England and America: Second Selection (31 January 1962).

  Plath is in charge of the couple’s finances, always looking ahead for ways to supplement their income, and becomes ‘extremely interested in money-managing’ in the process (9 July 1958). While she is still a student at Cambridge, Plath sends queries to some of her Smith College contacts, such as Professor Robert Gorham Davis, about future teaching vacancies. Her former English professor, Mary Ellen Chase, becomes one of her most ardent advocates and Plath is later offered a job as ‘freshman English instructor at Smith’ (9 April 1957) and Hughes is offered a ‘full-time instructorship at the University of Massachusetts in English’ (6 January 1958). In 1959 Hughes is awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and Plath also secures artistic residencies for both of them at Yaddo in the fall. When they live in London, Plath sends cheques from American publishers to her mother to deposit in their account at the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank where they receive 3½% interest instead of 2% offered in Britain (16 January 1960). Dr Horder, Plath’s favourite physician in England, gives her a letter of introduction to view a house at 4 Chalcot Crescent where she wants to live: ‘I do so want at least four children & am head over heels in love with London’ (28 November 1960). After five years they are able to buy a house in the country on their savings. Almost any goal Plath articulates in her letters later comes to fruition.

  It is possible to witness the specific experiences of Plath and Hughes described in letters that later result in poems. While they are living in Cambridge, Plath visits her bust, sculpted by Smith classmate Mary Derr Knox, that now resides in one of the trees on Grantchester Meadows and writes ‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’ (3 February 1957). In April 1957 she walks with Hughes at dawn to Grantchester and stands on a stile to recite ‘in a resonant voice’ all she can remember from the Canterbury Tales to twenty cows (8 April 1957). Many years later Hughes publishes the poem ‘Chaucer’ about this incident in the New Yorker and in his book Birthday Letters. A cornered groundhog on Mount Holyoke in Hadley, Massachusetts, inspires Plath’s poem ‘Incommunicado’ (5 July 1958). A walk with Aurelia, Warren, and Ted around Beacon Hill inspires ‘A Winter Tale’ (13 October 1959). The birth of Frieda is chronicled in ‘Morning Song’ (15 April 1960). ‘Tulips’, which is commissioned for the summer poetry festival at the Mermaid Theatre in London and later published in the New Yorker, is written after Plath’s ‘latest bout in hospital’ for an appendectomy following her miscarriage three weeks earlier (13 April 1961). Plath’s radio play Three Women is also partially based on this hospital experience as well as two poems published in George MacBeth’s Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963).

  In addition to poetry, Plath and Hughes try other kinds of writing to earn money. Plath sends short stories, such as ‘The Perfect Place’, to British women’s magazines, essays with original drawings to the Christian Science Monitor, and, early in her career, toils daily on the rough draft of her first novel Hill of Leopards (later entitled Falcon Yard), which is never published (7 May 1957). She later reviews children’s picture books for the New Statesman because of her interest in the art of illustration. Hug
hes initially writes short stories for children published in Jack and Jill (6 January 1958) and Meet My Folks! – ‘a book of humorous poems about relatives’ that T. S. Eliot accepts for Faber & Faber with a few suggested revisions (December 1958). Plath also writes a children’s book (The Bed Book) and tells Ann Davidow-Goodman that she wishes Maurice Sendak would do the illustrations (12 June 1959). During their ten-week stay at Yaddo, Plath writes another children’s book (The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit) while Hughes writes a play (The House of Taurus), ‘based on the Euripides play The Bacchae’ (7 October 1959), followed by The House of Aries (9 July 1960), a libretto of an opera based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead (19 July 1960), and The Calm, ‘a sort of dark opposite to Shakespeare’s Tempest’ (26 February 1961). Hughes eventually garners success with his adult short stories, such as ‘The Rain Horse’ published in Harper’s, which Plath thinks is a real masterpiece ‘better than DH Lawrence’s descriptive stories’ (8 October 1959). Some of Plath’s psychological short stories, such as ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’, are accepted by the London Magazine (12 November 1959). On 26 December 1959 Hughes even makes fair copies of his two poetry book manuscripts to sell and is offered £160 (about $450). Plath later sells 130 pages of her early poetry manuscripts for £100 ($280) to the same bookseller in London ‘who is buying stuff for the University of Indiana’ (20 November 1961).

  Recording programmes for the BBC is their most lucrative venture besides publishing. In April 1957, after Hughes broadcasts his poems over the BBC Third Programme, Plath writes directly to D. S. Carne-Ross to try out for the ‘Poet’s Voice’ herself. However, her first extant poetry recordings are for the Library of Congress with Lee Anderson on 18 April 1958 and on two occasions at Steven Fassett’s studios on Beacon Hill for Harvard (13 June 1958 and 22 February 1959). Once the BBC is willing to record her ‘odd accent’, Plath suggests a programme about young American women poets (24 October 1960). In addition to recording their poetry and Hughes’s verse plays and partial translations of the Odyssey, they are also interviewed for Two of a Kind and other programmes. Plath confides to Marvin Kane that she is excited about participating in What Made You Stay? and ‘being on a program all to myself’ (15 July 1962).