… Now we are “at home,” London is a delight.
x x x Sivvy
THURSDAY EVENING
MARCH 3, 1960
Dear Mother,
… I really put my foot down about visitors now. I get tired easily and like the house to myself so I can cook, read, write, or rest when I please. I have really been strained living out of suitcases on shipboard, at Ted’s crowded home, and then in and out of boarding houses in London and with the Huwses, so that I have no desire for people sleeping in my living room or causing me extra cooking or housework. Ted’s sister is also coming to London this weekend, but she will stay with a girl friend. I feel most like walking, reading, and musing by myself now after three long months of enforced external, exerting and extrovert living.
Monday we went to a buffet with David and Barbara Ross at which Luke, Danny and Helga and others were present—most of the crowd that published the one and only issue of the Botolph’s Review, where I first saw Ted’s poems and at the celebration of which I first met him. David Ross, the editor, very young (24), a stockbroker and diabetic, quiet and nice, has a son; Luke is to sail for New Orleans, March 18—his wife will have a baby in May; of course, the Huwses have their Magdalene, and we are about to have our Nicholas/Rebecca. Amusing to see what paternal and familial fates have, four years later, fallen on such once-confirmed bachelors!
Tuesday we had lunch with two of Ted’s editors from Faber (after my relaxation classes at my Clinic) and dined sumptuously in a Soho Greek restaurant, blissfully ignoring prices … They are working on getting an illustrator for Ted’s children’s book, and we have our fingers crossed. They’ve written to our First Choice, and if he did it, it should sell marvelously. I won’t breathe his name until we hear definitely; he may, of course, refuse to do it as he has no end of assignments.
Wednesday evening we went for cocktails with John Lehmann, editor of the London magazine, who reminisced about his memories of Virginia Woolf, et al. I met the popular British Oxford graduate-poetess, Elizabeth Jennings, a Catholic, who reads for a London publishing house and lives in a convent while here, returning to her rooms in Oxford on weekends to write (she has three volumes out). We got along very well. [Met] a lawyer-poet-novelist, Roy Fuller, and lady novelist-reviewer, Christine Brooke-Rose. I must get them all in my diary. Very pleasant time. Lehmann is publishing my “Daughters of Blossom Street” (changed from “This Earth Our Hospital”) sometime this spring … I just got the proofs. He’s also taken two more poems….
… Went to my doctor again today, and he let me listen to the baby’s heartbeat! I was so excited. He said the baby is in fine position. I like him much better than any doctor I had in America. All shots—whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, polio—are given free and Health Visitors tell you when to get what. I won’t go to the Clinic, but will have my doctor give them. I couldn’t have kinder or better care.
… We hope to get our phone in next week and will call you as soon as the baby is born to announce your Grandmotherhood.
Having my book accepted here is very consoling at this time of change and anticipation. Ironically, two other British publishers (one from the Oxford University Press) have asked to see a book since I signed my contract. I hope some American press will see fit to take it eventually.
x x x Sivvy
MARCH 10, 1960
Dear Mother,
… Here there has been not a whiff of snow all winter, and I am homesick for it. The last four months seem like an endless, drawn-out, grey-brown November. Ted and I went for a walk on Primrose Hill this noon after lunch, and the air was mild and damply springlike; the sun almost warm, and green buds out on all the lilac bushes; the forsythia looks about to open.
… Ted is, if anything, too nice to his relatives and friends, and I got weary sitting for eight hours at a stretch in our smoke-filled rooms, waiting for them to leave—impossible to nap or relax with so many people around. I feel very unlike entertaining anyone just now, simply “in-waiting,” wanting to read, write in my diary, and nap. Luckily we have no more prospective visitors (knock on wood) and I have been able to lie down in the afternoons, which rests me enough to sleep at night. The baby has been growing by leaps and bounds, and the doctor said when I saw him today that it seemed to have very long legs, which accounts for the surprising occasional bumps and visible kicks which appear on my right side….
x x x Sivvy
MARCH 24, 1960
Dearest Mother,
… Your copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal arrived on the best possible day, Monday, when I was too miserable with my cold for anything but that. I read it from cover to cover and enjoyed it immensely. Perfect sickbed reading!
Wonderful news via telegram just came for Ted. He’s got the Somerset Maugham Award for his book—about 400 pounds—just over $1,000, which has to be spent “enlarging his world-view” in about three months abroad. We are envisioning the Greek Islands next winter and all sorts of elegant sun-saturated schemes.
x x x Sivvy
SATURDAY NOON
MARCH 26, 1960
Dearest Mother,
Well, all is quiet and uneventful. I somehow imagine I should be seeing large comets or lions in the street at this point, but can’t believe the baby will ever come. I sort of expected it early—didn’t we arrive early?—and really am set on the 27th, that mystical number [an important date for various friends and family members] for a date now, but this waiting feels ready to go on forever….
… A marvelous folklore library is just down the street from us. I think I’d rather live in London than anywhere in the world, and get a seaside cottage in Cornwall someday, too! Ted’s going to work on a libretto for a modern young Chinese opera-composer we met at Yaddo. I hope that works out….
Your letter about Lupercal arrived today, and we’re so pleased you like it and that the copies came intact. Ted is now in the middle of writing on a second play, and I am convinced it is only a matter of time before he does a stageable one. We got his official letter from the Secretary of the Somerset Maugham Trust today; he’s got the 1960 award “on the strength of the literary quality and promise” of The Hawk in the Rain. This year the Award is 500 pounds! One hundred more than usual, about $1,400. We have to spend it within two years from now by spending “at least three months outside Great Britain and Ireland, with the object, not of having a holiday abroad, but of acquainting yourself with the manners and customs of foreign nations and thereby having an opportunity to increase your experience and knowledge for your future literary benefit.” So we will take the three months in the sunny south (we’ve thought of France, Italy, Greece) either next winter or the one after that. Ideally, we’d rent a furnished villa on the Mediterranean near a large and cosmopolitan city so I could register the baby with a doctor and have one of those foreign maid-babysitters and could have at least 4–6 hours a day free to write, too….
They ask Ted to write a thank-you note to Maugham in his French Riviera villa. How I would love to meet him! I am especially partial to the French Riviera because of the relative ease in language, but Rome and environs are a possibility—an immense English-speaking civilization there.
We hear the clear song of a certain thrush at dawn each morning. The square is full of children, playing something like baseball with flat bats. The daily ice cream truck jingles to a stop and the little ones all rush up. Oh, I am so impatient!
(Monday noon, March 28) Well, I am about to go out shopping, round as ever. Since the baby did not take advantage of the significant 27th date, I am sure it will wait till April Fool’s Day, just to get into the main Plath Month. [Her father’s birthday, April 13; mine, the 26th; and Warren’s, the 27th.] Ted’s bought me a marvelous huge covered French earthenware casserole and I cooked a whole pile of little tough pigeons in it (9 cents each) and served them with rice, in which I stirred a delectable mixture of fried onions, garlic, raisins and blanched almond slices when it was cooked dry and fluffy. Marvelous….
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Yesterday, lazing in bed and leafing through the Sunday Observer, I came on a marvelous review of Lupercal by A. Alvarez, the intelligent reviewer (Oxford, Princeton, etc.) who had been approving, but with reservations, about The Hawk in the Rain. A column and a half—excerpts: “There are no influences to side-track the critic, no hesitations to reassure him. Hughes has found his own voice, created his own artistic world and has emerged as a poet of the first importance … What Ted Hughes has done is to take a limited, personal theme and, by an act of immensely assured poetic skill, has broadened it until it seems to touch upon nearly everything that concerns us. This is not easy poetry to read, but it is new, profound and important.”
We cooed and beamed all day. At the movie everybody was reading the Observer and some were just at Ted’s review. I turned a bit further: his picture, among the South African massacres, news about the Maugham Award and even a note about me—“his tall, trim American wife … who is a New Yorker poet in her own right.” We’ll send you copies when we get some.
Ted is being marvelously good and understanding. He’s as impatient and eager as I, if that’s possible. Well, keep calm for another week.
x x x Sivvy
THURSDAY EVENING
MARCH 31, 1960
Dear Mother and Warren,
… In her/his infinite wisdom, the baby is waiting until my cold is all gone (I’m just at the last vestiges now and feel close to my old self again), till the weather improves (it’s been raw, sleety, utterly grey and nasty till today, which is green, sunny, and lambish) and till the very last touches are calmly put on the apartment. My midwife came yesterday and cheered us by laughingly predicting it would arrive at 2 a.m. Sunday; I wish it would, because she is on duty this weekend, and if I had her (there is a shift of three midwives), I’d be overjoyed. We both are very fond of her. I saw my doctor today, who examined me inside and out and said everything was ripe and ready for my having the baby in the next few days….
Ted and I took a lovely, quiet walk this evening under the thin new moon, over the magic landscape of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park; all blue and misty, the buds a kind of nimbus of green on the thorn trees, daffodils and blue squills out on the lawns and the silhouettes of wood pigeons roosting in the trees. A heavenly hour of peace and easy strolling, our first in weeks. I want to have nothing to do after it comes, so am busying myself, cleaning house, etc., now. Waiting for Dot’s meat loaf [Aunt Dot’s recipe] in the oven. Will make a big fish soup tomorrow.
Ted’s been getting a flood of letters from all sorts of people about his award, a real stack of mail. Two requests to give readings (one in June, with me and someone else, and one in December, which would pay about $35 for the hour), editors asking for poems, old friends stirred into writing, etc. I must type answers for him tomorrow, or they’ll) never get done.
Well, I’ll put this aside for a day, in case I collect any more news.
On the morning of April 1, 1960, at about 3 a.m., the phone at my bedside rang. I was awake at once, grabbed the receiver, and called into it, “Hello!”
“Mother,” said a tremulous voice.
“Sylvia!” I cried. “How are you!”
A click and we were disconnected. I waited a bit, then called the overseas operator, who advised me just to wait.
Wait I did, for a whole, interminable hour, walking the floor, praying, and reassuring myself with “At least, she’s alive.” Then the ring once more and Sylvia’s voice, now clear and strong, giving me details of the baby’s vital statistics. I interrupted to ask, “Is it Nicholas or Frieda Rebecca?”
“Oh, Frieda Rebecca, of course! Ein Wunderkind, Mummy. Ein Wunderkind!”
APRIL 1ST, 1:15 P.M.
P.S.
Well, just twelve hours ago I woke up groggy from two sleeping pills, after one hour’s hard-won sleep, and everything began. The miraculous rapidity of the delivery amazed even my seasoned doctor and midwife, which is why I had absolutely no anesthesia. The midwife, a capable little Indian woman I had visit me once before, came on her bicycle “to see how I was getting on” about 2 a.m. and planned to see my contractions establish, leave and return after breakfast. In no time I was contracting violently with scarcely a rest. I thought the worst pains, just before the second stage of pushing began, were only the beginning and didn’t see how I could last through 20 more hours of them. Suddenly, at five, she said I was fully dilated and showed me the baby’s head—a crack of it—in the mirror. She called the doctor, but he was at home and had no anesthesia handy. He came about 5:30, just in time to supervise the delivery.
I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, little funny dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes. At 5:45 exactly. The afterbirth came shortly after. Ted was there the whole time, holding my hand, rubbing my back and boiling kettles—a marvelous comfort. I couldn’t take my eyes off the baby. The midwife sponged her beside the bed in my big pyrex mixing bowl, wrapped her up well, near a hot water bottle in the crib; she sucked at me a few minutes like a little expert and got a few drops of colostrum and then went to sleep.
From where I sit, propped up in bed, I can see her, pink and healthy, sound asleep. We can’t imagine now having favored a boy! Ted is delighted. He’d been hypnotizing me to have a short, easy delivery. Well, it wasn’t “easy,” but the shortness carried me through. I slept an hour or two after calling you—feel I could get up and walk about, but am, of course, wobbly. The miracle is how after my sinus siege of two weeks and sleepless nights, I should be lucky to have only 4½ hours’ labor. “A wonder child,” the midwife said. Of course, of course!
Ted brought me breakfast—I’d vomited up all that meat loaf at the start of labor—and a tuna salad, cheese and V-8 lunch, which I have just finished with gusto. I feel light and thin as a feather. The baby is, as I told you, 7 pounds, 4 ounces, 21 inches long and, alas, she has my nose! On her, though, it seems quite beautiful. Well, I have never been so happy in my life. The whole American rigamarole of hospitals, doctors’ bills, cuts and stitches, anesthesia, etc., seems a nightmare well left behind. The midwife came a second time at 11 a.m. and will come again at tea time to wash me and care for the baby. I’ll write soon again. Love to “Grammy” and Uncle Warren from Frieda Rebecca, Ted, and your own Sivvy.
MONDAY NOON
APRIL 4, 1960
Dearest Mother,
Well, Rebecca is four days old, almost, and more beautiful than ever. It has been a lovely, sunny morning outside, and the trees look to be budding in the square. The baby is sleeping in the crib after being changed and bathed by the third midwife of the trio who work in my district, and I have taken my first bath, which put me in very good spirits. I don’t respond well to being bedded down and enjoyed getting up last night for a candlelight dinner with Ted—an unearthly delectable veal casserole Dido Merwin brought over to heat up … I have a ravenous appetite, drink loads of milk and water, V-8 with gelatine to improve my nails, and orange juice. It is so wonderful not to be in the hospital, but bit by bit to slip back into my old routine as the midwife gives me the go-ahead and as I feel stronger. Just tidying up this or that while sitting on a stool or chair makes me feel pleasant….
For the first week, these [home-delivered] babies tend to cry and wake at night as they are bathed in the morning and therefore drowsy all day. Rebecca is no exception and yells herself into fine red fits any time from midnight to four. So I nap in the day to make up for lost sleep and try to persuade Ted to do the same.
You should see him rocking her and singing to her! She looks so tiny against his shoulder, her four fingers just closing around one of his knuckles. Now, of course, she is sleeping like a top, rosy and pink-cheeked. Already she shows a funny independence and temper…. I’m allowed to go out with her if it’s nice on the tenth day, and I can’t wait….
We are dying to hear from you and Warren about your reactions to all this. Everybody is most
amazed by the rapidity of my labor, especially myself. I am sure one of the reasons I felt so well after the delivery and had no tears or anything is because I had no anesthesia and therefore was able to respond to all the directions of the doctor. And Rebecca, of course, looked lovely immediately, hasty lady that she was.
Things seem much calmer and more peaceful with the baby around than without … Ted will have a study and utter peace by the time I have all my strength back and am coping with baby and household. Now I rely on his cooking, shopping, going to the laundromat, etc., etc., and his help (so much better than a stranger’s) will be invaluable in my quick return to normal activity.
I’ll leave just a corner for Ted to say Hello….
Love to you, Warren and Sappho …
Sivvy
APRIL 7, 1960
Dear Mother,
Well, if I hadn’t heard from you today, I was seriously thinking of disowning my nearest kin! Ted said you’d probably be so busy informing half of America of this event that you’d not get around to writing me for at least a month. Anyhow, your letter was so cheering it made up for the days of waiting. I actually had a dream during my nap yesterday that Ted and I were waiting for you and Warren in the Wellesley kitchen. You both came in with huge armloads of groceries (this was before I read of your forgetting the groceries last weekend). “Well, what do you think of it!” we called out to you. Whereupon you handed us two letters, unstamped, that you had been about to send. I still haven’t heard from Warren, so get him to write in person, even if it’s only a little.
The one infuriating thing about the general euphoria around here is that I have no relatives or friends of my own to admire the baby in person. Ted’s people and friends are dear, the room is full of flowers, telegrams and cards and well wishes, but it isn’t the same.