Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes, "I had the queerest dreams last night", 22 October 1956

Sylvia Plath

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

referring to her letter of the previous night ("...all is calm now, and it is a fresh day; but the feelings I wrote about occur and recur..."), telling him that she has written two poems this morning, recounting her dreams of the previous night, and with news of her research into the conditions of her scholarship ("...I looked up the fulbright lists and found three married women on it; so singleness is not a condition of a fulbright for ladies..."), scattered autograph corrections and a one-line autograph postscript, 2 pages, 8vo (177 x 140mm), blue writing paper, [Whitstead, Newnham College, Cambridge], 22 October 1956

Plath had dreamt of Mrs Cantor, the woman for whom she had spent a summer babysitting on Cape Cod in 1952. The following morning she received her first letter from Mrs Cantor in six months. She had dreamt that she, Ted, and the Cantors were able to levitate themselves above a raincloud when they were sitting down to a "sort of wedding feast" at an outdoor banqueting table. Later, she and Ted used this power to escape her tutor Dr Krook (transformed into "a mad, dangerous witch"):

"we found a very vivid green lawn, with a dark willow, squat dark trunk, smack in the middle, and I was showing this to you, with our manuscripts laid out under the tree, as the place of peace where at last we could practice rising together to this world above dr. krook's power and power of storm and vicissitudes."

This letter was to prove to be the last in this sequence of love letters. The following day she telegrammed Ted urging him to come to Cambridge. He replied to say that he agreed their separation "seems mad", and was soon at her side. Plath told Dr Krook of her marriage. She was wholly sympathetic and reassured her about her scholarship. Neither Newnham nor the Fulbright objected to the marriage (see lot 23). Hughes lived (unofficially) in her college rooms until early December, when they took up a nearby flat (see lot 24), where they remained until leaving Cambridge for America in June.

LITERATURE:

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume One, pp.1325-26