Letters Home
by Sylvia Plath
Correspondence 1950–1963
Selected and Edited with Commentary
by Aurelia Schober Plath
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE September 27, 1950–June 1953
PART TWO Summer 1953–August 12, 1955
PART THREE September 25, 1955–April 29, 1956
PART FOUR May 3, 1956–June 17, 1957
PART FIVE July 1957–October 28, 1959
PART SIX December 13, 1959–August 25, 1961
PART SEVEN September 4, 1961–February 4, 1963
List of Poems
About the Author
Copyright
List of Illustrations
FRONTISPIECE: Sylvia Plath posing with a crystal ball, spring 1955
FRONTISPIECE: Sylvia and her mother in Winthrop, Mass., August 1937
INTRODUCTION
Aurelia and Otto Plath with Sylvia, 1933
An early photo of Otto Plath
Aurelia Plath, 1930
Sylvia, 1936
Sylvia, 1937
Otto Plath, 1930
Sylvia and Warren Plath, in Winthrop, Mass., 1940
Sylvia, September 1940
Excerpts from high school scrapbook
Sylvia, 1946
Sylvia, summer 1949
A fragment from Sylvia’s high school diary
PART ONE
Sylvia in the backyard in Wellesley, the day before she left for her Mademoiselle job, 1953
Sylvia’s high school graduation photo, 1950
Sylvia, Warren, and Aurelia, 1950
Sylvia going off to Smith, September 5, 1950
Sylvia interviewing Marianne Moore, 1953
Sylvia talking with Elizabeth Bowen, summer 1953
PART TWO
Sylvia going off to New York, holding a copy of Dostoevsky, 1954
Olive Higgins Prouty at her desk, 1950
Sylvia at the beach, summer 1954
Sylvia, 1954 –
Sylvia’s graduation photo from Smith
Sylvia typing in the backyard, 1954
PART THREE
Sylvia and Warren leaving for Cambridge and Harvard, September 1955
A handwritten postcard, 1956
Sylvia’s maternal grandparents, 1953
Sylvia’s fashion assignment
Newspaper clipping of Sylvia modeling
PART FOUR
Sylvia and Ted Hughes in Paris, 1956
Sylvia and Warren in Paris, 1956
Sylvia at home, winter 1956–57
A handmade birthday card, 1957
Sylvia in Yorkshire, 1956
PART FIVE
Sylvia on a cross-country camping trip, summer 1959
Sylvia sailing into New York harbor, June 1957
Sylvia and Ted at Cape Cod, 1958
Sylvia and catch, summer 1959
PART SIX
Sylvia and Frieda, spring 1960
Sylvia with Frieda, May 1960
PART SEVEN
The day after Nick’s christening—Sylvia, Frieda, and Nick in Devon, December 1962
Sylvia and Frieda, December 1962
Sylvia and Nick, December 1962
Sylvia and Nick in Devon, December 1962
Sylvia, her children, and her mother, July 1962
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to my son Warren J. Plath, and his wife, Margaret, whose approval, moral support and assistance encouraged me to undertake this project and helped me throughout the two years it has been in process.
My friend, the author Mary Stetson Clarke, freely gave of her expertise; her faith in the purpose of the venture sustained me.
Deep gratitude is owed to each member of my understanding, loyal family, especially my niece, Nancy Benotti, who read all of the lengthy first version and whose youthful enthusiasm helped greatly.
Among the many supportive friends, these deserve special mention: Ilah Heath, Marion Freeman, and the poet-author Roberta Teale Swartz Chalmers.
I am deeply indebted to my editor at Harper & Row, Mrs. Frances McCullough, for her willingness and assistance far beyond the call of duty.
I am deeply grateful to Ted Hughes for generously giving me the copyright for this selection from Sylvia Plath’s letters.
I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the late Olive Higgins Prouty for the donation of her file containing her complete correspondence with my daughter.
This book is dedicated to my grandchildren: Frieda and Nicholas, Jennifer, and Susan.
Introduction
In answer to the avalanche of inquiries that has descended upon me ever since the publication of Sylvia’s poems in Ariel and her novel, The Bell Jar, I am releasing a section of her intimate correspondence with her family from the time she entered Smith College.
It may seem extraordinary that someone who died when she was only thirty years old left behind 696 letters written to her family between the beginning of her college years in 1950 and her death early in February 1963. We could not afford long-distance telephoning, though, and Sylvia loved to write—so much so that she went through three typewriters in that same time.
Throughout these years I had the dream of one day handing Sylvia the huge packet of letters. I felt she could make use of them in stories, in a novel, and through them meet herself at the varied stages in her own development and taste again the moments of joy and triumph and more clearly evaluate those of sorrow and fear.
Along with the letters written to her brother, Warren, and to me, I have included correspondence with the late Olive Higgins Prouty (the novelist), for between Mrs. Prouty and Sylvia there existed a very special bond. Mrs. Prouty was not only the benefactress whose fund made Sylvia’s education at Smith possible, she also was Sylvia’s friend and came to her rescue when Sylvia suffered a breakdown in 1953. They found each other mutually fascinating as their relationship developed. After her marriage and the establishment of her writing career, Sylvia spoke of Mrs. Prouty as her “literary mother,” in whom she could confide with complete trust and freedom.
Throughout her prose and poetry, Sylvia fused parts of my life with hers from time to time, and so I feel it is important to lead into an account of her early years by first describing the crucial decisions and ruling forces in my own life. As is often the case in a family having European roots (ours were Austrian), my father made the important decisions during my childhood and early girlhood. However, in the early 1920’s, when financial catastrophe overtook our family as a result of unwise stock market investments, my father, broken in spirit and blaming himself most unjustly for his very human error, handed over the reins of management to my mother to the extent that my five-years-younger sister and my thirteen-years-younger brother grew up in a matriarchy. Nevertheless, ours was a peaceful, loving home, and I assumed that all marriages were like that of my parents.
Both my children were always asking me to “tell us about the olden days when you were a little girl,” and I shared with them the unforgettable memory of my first day in school. Although my father spoke four languages and had lived in England two years before migrating to the United States, he and my mother spoke German at home. There were no children nearby to play with, so I too spoke only German. I told my children how isolated I felt at recess as I stood by myself in a corner of the schoolyard, listening intently to what the children were shouting to each other. The two words I heard most frequently were “Shut up!” so when I went home at the end of the school day and met my father, I answered his greeting proudly and loudly with “Shut up!” I still remember how his face reddened. He took me across his knee and spanked me. Weeping loudly over t
hat injustice, I sobbed out, “Aber was bedeutet das, Papa? Was bedeutet das?” (What does that mean?) Then he realized I had not understood what the words meant; he was sorry, hugged me, and asked me to forgive him. It was my first and last spanking.
From that time on we always spoke English at home; my parents bought me all the books we used in school; father was our teacher, and mother and I studied together. By the end of the school term in June, I was given a “double promotion,” moving from the first to the third grade—a great boon for me, for I left behind those who had made such sport of my early mispronunciations.
Perhaps I aroused Sylvia’s interest in minority groups by my account of my early childhood in a primarily Italian-Irish neighborhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts, during World War I. Even though my father became an American citizen as soon as that privilege was possible, our name Schober, with its German sound, resulted in my being ostracized by the neighborhood “gang,” called “spy-face,” and at one time being pushed off the school bus steps and dumped on the ground, while the bus driver, keeping his eyes straight ahead, drove off.
I felt this prejudice was completely unjust for my parents’ sake as well as my own, for they were ardent converts to American democracy. They believed every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered and, because of him, voted the Republican ticket all their lives. Support at home compensated me for outside unpleasantness, as well as did success in the classroom; and family games, walks, visits on Sunday to the Museum of Fine Arts or to my paternal uncle’s family in Jamaica Plain were the sweeteners of my childhood.
Then, too, I found my complete escape in the sugar-coated fiction of the day, wherein the poor and the virtuous always ultimately triumphed. I still possess one of Louisa May Alcott’s own annotated copies of Little Women (given my father for me by a descendant of the Alcott family), worn to tatters, much of which I knew by heart. I read every one of Horatio Alger’s stories, the novels of Harold Bell Wright, Gene Stratton Porter, and all the romantic historical novels I could find in the public library.
In my junior year in high school, I had the good fortune to have an inspirational English teacher who improved my taste. From then on Emily Dickinson’s poetry became my new bible; the novels of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James—in fact, the world of American and English prose and poetry burst upon me, filling me with the urgency to read, read. I lived in a dream world, a book tucked under every mattress of the beds it was my chore to make up daily; a book in the bathroom hamper, and the family’s stock answer to “What’s RiRi [my nickname] doing?” was “Oh, she’s reading again.”
Fortunately, my mother was most sympathetic and when I was in college read my literature books too, saying cheerily, “More than one person can get a college education on one tuition.” (I remembered that vividly when my daughter went to Smith and I, through her, broadened my horizons further in modern literature and art.) I completely identified with the characters in a poem or story, and my ever-growing wish became to open to other young people this wonder of multiple living through vicarious experience—to teach.
It never occurred to me to question my father’s decision as to the type of education I should receive. I was to be a “business woman.” Obediently, I signed up for a two-year course in the Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters, doggedly applying myself to the vocational subjects, delighting in history, English composition and literature, as well as the courses in German language, literature and drama. I took on any part-time job I could get, for even the small tuition of that day was hard come by. I had worked in the public library since the age of fourteen and had my first full-time job the summer after high school in an insurance company, typing dull form letters eight hours a day five and a half days a week from wax dictation cylinders—a grim experience I vowed no child of mine would ever have to endure.
As soon as I had completed my two years of combined academic and vocational studies, I persuaded my father to allow me to sign up for two more years in order to prepare myself for teaching English and German, along with vocational subjects, on the high school level.
I now sought out more interesting summer positions, working at the close of my junior year (1927) for a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a handwritten manuscript in German dealing with new principles of soil mechanics. As he had a publication deadline to meet, I usually worked into the early evening, so we often had dinner together before I left Boston for home. It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists that led me to Greek drama, Russian literature, the works of Hermann Hesse, the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as the writings of great world philosophers. That experience was to affect me the rest of my life, for I realized how narrow my world had been and that self-education could be and should be an exciting lifelong adventure. It was the beginning of my dream for the ideal education of the children I hoped some day to have.
In 1929, after teaching English in Melrose (Massachusetts) High School for the year following my graduation from Boston University, I decided I would return to the university to earn a Master of Arts degree in English and German. In making out my graduate schedule, I learned that Dr. Otto Emil Plath taught the course in Middle High German that I wished to take. I had met Professor Plath briefly at one of the meetings of the German Club in the past and had learned that while his chief interest lay in biology and allied sciences, he was a gifted linguist and the only member of the faculty in the College of Liberal Arts to give this particular course. Dr. Plath greeted me cordially—a very fine-looking gentleman, I thought, with extraordinarily vivid blue eyes and a fair, ruddy complexion. When I brought up the subject of Middle High German, he said that he would enjoy conducting the class but would have to be assured that a minimum of ten students would sign up for it. I told him I would make it my responsibility to talk with all the students I knew who were interested in German, and by the beginning of the fall semester fifteen students had registered for the course.
I remember the last day of classes at the university very clearly, because when I went to say good-bye to my professors, Professor Plath, who was alone in the German office at the time, played about with a pen on his desk for a bit, then, without looking at me, said that Professor Joseph Haskell and his wife, Josephine (both of whom had been my teachers in undergraduate courses) had invited him to spend the next weekend at their farm and had urged him to bring a friend along. Should I care to join him, he would appreciate it. It was a bolt out of the blue, but Mrs. Haskell was by that time a dear friend; I was ready for some fun and this promised to be interesting, at least.
An early photo of Otto Plath
I learned much about Otto Plath that weekend. He could be spontaneous, jolly, and certainly was confiding. He astounded me by telling me that he had married over fourteen years before. He and his wife had soon separated, and he had not seen her for thirteen years. Were he to form a serious relationship with a young woman now, of course he would obtain a divorce. He thought my A.M. thesis proved we had much in common and he said he would like to know me better. In response to this I told him that I had accepted a position as manager of the business office of twin camps for underprivileged children in Pine Bush, New York, for the summer, but added I would be happy to correspond with him and see him in the fall. In the voluminous correspondence that followed, he wrote me a brief story of his life, which I recall as follows:
Otto Plath grew up in the country town of Grabow, Germany (Polish Corridor territory), speaking German and Polish, and learning French in school. His citizenship papers indicate his nationality was uncertain. He told me his parents were German but that one grandmother was Polish.
His father was a skilled mechanic and worked
at the trade of blacksmith. (I was told that when his father, years after his son’s arrival here, came to the United States and took on a homestead grant in Oregon, he worked on some refinements of the McCormick reaper which were put to use.) As a young boy in Germany, Otto’s “sweet tooth” and his inability to obtain money to purchase candy to satisfy it, led him to observe the nesting sites of bumblebees. These, he discovered, were usually built in the deserted nest of some rodent. At first, running the risk of being stung, he used to watch the bees emerge on a sunny morning from a particular spot in a field—easier to detect after hay had been cut in that area. Once they had left, he would insert a long, hollow straw into the nest below the ground surface and suck out the “wild” honey. Later, he dared to transfer such bumblebee colonies to cigar boxes and keep them in the family garden, thus having access to a constant supply of honey. His skill won him the name of Bienenkönig (bee king) from his contemporaries. Thus was born a lifelong interest in entomology.
Otto’s grandparents, after emigrating to the United States, had settled on a small farm in Watertown, Wisconsin. Upon learning that this grandson was a top student in all his classes, they offered to send him to Northwestern College, Wisconsin, provided he would promise to prepare himself afterward for the Lutheran ministry. The opportunity appeared dazzling. Not only would he have the higher education which in Germany would be unobtainable for a boy in his circumstances, but he would escape military service, the thought of which he dreaded, for he was already a confirmed pacifist. At sixteen he arrived in New York, where an uncle owned and managed a combination food and liquor store. Otto lived with this family for a year, obtaining permission to audit classes in a grade school in order to learn to speak English in all subjects. He sat at the back of each classroom, making voluminous notes, talking with the children and the teachers after school. He promoted himself as soon as he felt he had mastered the vocabulary of that grade and within a year had progressed through all eight grades, all the while working for his uncle after school hours. The result was that he spoke English without a trace of foreign accent.