‘Letters Home’ by Sylvia Plath

To date, while I have always had an interest in the compelling Sylvia Plath / Ted Hughes story, I have resisted plunging in and reading enough to form a view about it. I have read some of their poems, and last year enjoyed reading ‘The Bell Jar’, but have I think been reluctant to dig deeper due to false assumptions.

I always supposed – entirely wrongly – that because Sylvia’s life ended in suicide at the age of just thirty in 1963, that she must have spent most of it being profoundly unwell and that reading about it and her ultimately unsuccessful marriage would be a thoroughly depressing experience. I now know that this is absolutely not the case at all. Her life was short, but absolutely packed with interest, and there were many more highs than lows.

‘Letters Home’ was edited by her mother Aurelia and published fifty years ago in April 1976 at a time when interest in her was growing, but before she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her collected poems and became widely hailed as the poetic voice of her generation. The book runs to 500 pages, and this only represents a portion of the thousands of letters Sylvia Plath wrote in her adult life, most of which have now been published in two even bigger volumes. These are those she wrote to her mother and her brother, plus a handful of others. It is unclear from reading the book how selective her mother was when editing.

The collection is extraordinarily engaging, and I found it very hard to put it down and switch the light off to sleep each night while I was reading it. Sylvia Plath wrote long, sparkling letters to her mother most weeks, and often more regularly, from when she first left home to attend Smith College in 1950, through her time at Newnham College in Cambridge and then the years of her marriage when she and Ted Hughes travelled a lot. They lived for periods in London, Boston and latterly not so far from me in Tawton, Devon.

During this thirteen year period Sylvia achieved a vast amount and lived her life with extraordinary intensity. Through her letters we observe her growing from a highly gifted and driven student into a writer of originality and brilliance, a wife and mother, but obviously not yet the major literary ‘celebrity’ that she would become after her death. And while the sentences that make up her letters are not neatly honed as would have been the case had she been writing them for publication, she seems to me to have been incapable writing anything that does not convey the thoughts and feelings she was looking to convey with clarity and eloquence, even when bashing out a spontaneous letter to her mother early in the morning before turning her attention to serious study and writing. She was also, of course, able to be less guarded in what she wrote to her family. Here is one examples from the many that I jotted down while reading these letters:

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham. Daily we rather merciless and merry Americans, South African and Scottish students remark the types at the Dons’ table, which range from a tall cadaverous woman with purple hair (really!), to a midget Charles Addams fat creature who has to stand on a stool to get to the soup tureen. They are all very brilliant or learned (quite a different thing) in their specialized ways, but I feel that all their experience is secondary (second hand?) and this is tantamount to a kind of living death. I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and in move in a world of growth and suffering where the real books are peoples’ minds and souls. I am blessed with great desires to give of love and time, and find that people respond to this. It is often tempting to hide from the blood and guts of life in a neat special subject on paper where one can become an unchallenged expert, but I, like Yeats, would rather say: ‘It was my glory that I had such friends,’ when I finally leave the world.

There are in these letters, occasional hints of periods of depression and references to therapists and drugs. Sylvia Plath was a highly ambitious and determined young woman, and occasionally she gives voice to her stresses and frustration at the slow progress she was making to the achievement of her career aspirations and her own perceived limitations. But these are few and far between. For the most part she is relentlessly up-beat and revelling in being alive. The experience of reading the letters is not a remotely cheerless experience. Far from it. They are for the most part extraordinarily life-affirming, even the letters she wrote in the aftermath of her failed suicide attempt in the summer of 1953:

I know now I have already faced the Worst (total negation of self) and that, having lived through that blackness, like Peer Gynt …. I can enjoy life simply for what it is: a continuous job, but most worth it. My existence now rests on solid ground; I may be depressed now and then, but never desperate. I know how to wait…

That was written in February 1956 just a few weeks before everything changed forever for Sylvia when she met Ted Hughes at a party in Cambridge and immediately decided that he was ‘the only man I’ve met here yet who’s is strong enough to be equal with – such is life’. Their extraordinarily intense love affair then ensued, and three months later they were married.

Before this a lot of time and effort had been put into dating men, and in the search for a husband with whom she could settle down to work alongside and bring up a family. She wanted someone older than her who was both ‘strong’ (I guess mentally as well as physically) and her intellectual equal. There were a number who nearly made the grade, but no one who bowled her over so completely as Ted Hughes who was when she met him beginning to establish himself as a poet, playwright and children’s author. The letters demonstrate how completely the couple were devoted to one another, highly supportive of one another professionally and able to bring the best out of one another artistically.

They are also revealing in that they demonstrate how achieving success in writing of any kind, but poetry in particular, requires very hard graft. This couple worked like cart horses. They were highly disciplined in terms of setting aside time to write, taking the view that it was necessary to write for several hours each day to keep their skills honed, even if what they produced fell well short of a publishable standard. Gradually though, over time, commissions, prizes, grants and publishers cheques come rolling in and by the late 1950s they were able to buy a flat in London and then a manor house in Devon. By coincidence, their London flat was in Chalcott Square just north of Regents Park which is also now the home of Alan Bennett whose diaries I had so much pleasure reading earlier in the month.

In London, they started to attend literary parties and to get to know influential people. The BBC became a significant employer and they were forever going to the theatre. Their social life was enviable to put it mildly. Here is an extract from a letter she wrote after attending a 1960 dinner party given by TS and Valerie Eliot:

Then the Spenders arrived; he handsome and white haired, and she …. lean, vibrant, talkative, lovely. Her name is Natasha Litvin, and she is a concert pianist. Talk was intimate gossip about Stravinsky, Auden, Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence. I was fascinated. Floated into dinner, sat between Eliot and Spender, rapturously, and got along very well. Both of them, of course, were instrumental in Ted’s getting his Guggenheim and his book printed.

The final letters are, of course, hard to read knowing what was about to happen. The marriage with Ted Hughes broke down in the summer of 1962 after his affair with Assia Wevill commenced. Sylvia retained the house in Devon, but moved back to London with the children and gave every appearance in her letters home to be coping very well. She completed ‘The Bell Jar’, wrote some of her most exceptional poetry, moved into a flat just round the corner from Chalcott Square where Yeats had previously lived, pottered about London in her car and set about planning to thrive in a post-Ted world. The letters give little hint that another – and this time successful – suicide attempt was about to be made.

And this, of course, was because she was largely writing to a concerned mother and was trying always to be more cheerful than perhaps she really was. It is interesting to compare the letters with her far more introspective and downbeat diary entries. Ted Hughes destroyed the final volumes which were, one assumes, far too painful for him to read. But the early journals have been published and they do convey a rather different impression from the letters. Many more private thoughts and a fuller record of what she got up to than the letters home could deal with.

This was the most enjoyable read of the year so far. I was very happily transported for several evenings into Sylvia Plath’s world, reading her poems and journals alongside the letters. I think it will be hard to resist reading more of her and about her over the coming months. If she had lived she would now be 94 and, I like to think, dropping in to see Alan Bennett on a regular basis in Chalcott square, both writing about the other in their respective diaries. He might even have written a play about them getting together for tea and cakes. But such was not to be.