Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes, "I keep saying to myself: I am married", 21 October 1956

Sylvia Plath

Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes ("dearest ted...")

on a riverside walk in Cambridge and her weekend life, the publication of a story in Granta, her work ("...must read hooker & cambridge platonists today..."), dreams, and plans for their meeting the following weekend, scattered autograph corrections, 5-line autograph postscript, 4 pages, 8vo (177 x 140mm), blue writing paper, [Whitstead, Newnham College, Cambridge], 21 October 1956

"...it is just before noon, and now clouds are covering the sheeny clear morning; I took my little notebook and walked along the river for an hour, making my way through mud and a quag of wet decayed leaves along by where you called the owls that night; I saw a strange animal that looked at first like a squirrel but wasn't, climbing up by the mud bank; was it a muskrat? an otter? passing three quiet fishermen, I went and sat up on the bank, writing a page of very simple description of the scene, watching a translucent amber spider stitch his shiny thread from grass blade to stinging nettle, listening to the fall of yellow willow leave, and breathing it all in..."

In this letter Plath describes both her attempt to fit into the rhythm of Cambridge student life, only to find this undercut by Hughes's absence. After her riverside walk she had returned home to find her one of her Indian housemates ironing her saris ("I have never seen such vivid jeweled colors, shining in gossamery silk"), received Granta with her story 'The Day Mr Prescott Died' (see lot 16), and then went to a double-bill at the cinema. Nevertheless, she still found herself pounding the streets in moonlight, revisiting sites of earlier trysts with Hughes, and feeling "these electric shocks of knowing how I miss you". She also remembers Hughes "calling the owls" on Granchester Road - a moment recalled by Hughes in 'The Owl' (Birthday Letters).

LITERATURE:

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume One, pp.1318-20