Sylvia Plath | Autograph letter signed, to Edith & William Hughes, visiting "the town of my childhood", 17 January 1959

Sylvia Plath

Autograph letter signed, to Edith and William Hughes ("Dear Ted's mother & dad")

describing a "trip by train & bus to Winthrop, the town of my childhood", with an accompanying sketch-map, also making light of building work in their apartment building that had left them without heat and light ("all this is amusing"), Hughes's continuing success, and their plan to settle in England, 1 page, folio (253 x 202mm), pink airmail stationery, [9 Willow Street, Boston, MA,] 17 January [1959], minor stain

"...the house where I spent my first ten years, the bay I swam in, all barge tar & airplane oil, & out to my grandmother's house on a road running to a once-island, now joined to the land - the town, once an old fishing port, is gone to rack & ruin - but I love it better than any place I've ever been, although I wouldn't want to bring up a family there. We had one of our pleasantest days & I am now writing some poems commemorating the place..."

Otto, Aurelia, and the young Sylvia Plath moved to Winthrop in 1937, when Sylvia was five, although Sylvia had earlier spent much time in the town staying with her grandparents. It was Aurelia's hometown and it was easier for her to be close to her family who could provide support as she spent an increasing amount of time nursing Otto, who was now chronically ill; it was in Winthrop, in 1940, that Sylvia's father died. Some eighteen months later, in the summer of 1942, Aurelia moved with her daughter to Wellesley. Plath made several trips to Winthrop during their year in Boston, but it was only on 9 March 1959 that she made her first visit to her father's grave. On seeing the grave, she felt the urge to "dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead" (quoted in Clark, Red Comet, p.556). As Plath mentions here, Winthrop, with its tired coast, its prison, its family resonances, and its gravestones, inspired a number of poems:

"No lame excuses can gloss over

Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier.

I should have known better." (from 'Green Rock, Winthrop Bay')

LITERATURE

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume Two, pp.290-91