Transcript:

3 Chalcot Square

London N.W.1

January 4, 1960

 

Dear Dr. Beuscher,

 

I wonder if I could write you about an old and ugly problem that reared its head with renewed vengeance this last week — namely Ted’s sister. I’d appreciate it immensely if you could drop me a few helpful and commonsensical words on the subject as you did four years ago when she was endeavouring to send a sequence of her female Hungarian friends to live with us.

We all went up to Yorkshire for Christmas: Ted, me, the baby & Olwyn fresh from Paris dressed completely in black with her hair dyed bright red. She has always had a cold, and what I call for lack of a better word “sophisticated” control of her emotions in relation to me: treating me with a definite, yet civil dismissal, rather like an obtuse piece of furniture that somehow got in her way. She never talks to me, but through me, around me and to Ted, and never in all the years I’ve known her has she asked me a personal question or made a comment on anything involving me. I felt, and foolishly it now seems, that she would grow to accept Ted’s marriage and forgive me for being a person with marked opinions, feelings and “presence”, but this Christmas some small spark touched off the powderkeg & she made obvious to Ted & his mother what I’ve known all along: that her resentment is a pure and sweeping and peculiarly desperate hatred. Curiously I was very relieved: her total & patronizing snubbing of me was not pleasant (she always calls me little”, although I’m a good inch taller than she is). [Handwritten marginalia: ^You remember “little” was also a favorite word of mine!–diminishing to innocence + harmless emotions I deeply feared!] Anyway, we have been living in the same small house for a week and I felt that the “surface” between us was better than usual, but on the last day of our stay—Ted’s and mine—the outburst came. Olwyn had been nagging at us for being too critical of people ever since she came up & finally I asked her to lay off & said she was as critical as the two of us put together. This is the first time I actually confronted her in the open & the transformation was astounding. She started to fume and shriek and the stream of words ran more or less “youre a nasty bitch, a nasty selfish bitch, Miss Plath” (she calls me by my maiden name as if by that she could unmarry marry) “you act as if our house were your palace, I watched you eat Christmas dinner & you certainly stuffed yourself, you think you can get away with everything, you’re trying to come between Ted & me, you bully me and my mother and Ted. I’m the daughter in this house. You criticized a book I bought last year (this being a nice enough poet whose poems neither Ted nor I like), you criticized a friend of mine (this being a dull Dutchman Ted & I found dry & boring) you’re a bitch, an immature woman, inhospitable, intolerant…” and on and on. Earlier on, on returning from shopping with Ted, she said to me with one of her inimitable smiles “All the people on the bus thought Ted had a new red-headed wife.” And Ted’s mother did say blandly that the two of them slept in the same bed till Olwyn was 9 and Ted 7. So she does have a five year lead on me.

I said very little & Ted & his mother sat stunned. The main thing she seemed to resent was my existence as Ted’s wife, not just me. She of course criticizes poets and people with a vengeance, but my disagreeing with her she couldn’t take, nor my own writing, either.

It so happened that at Christmas my book had a whole spate of very good, even rave, reviews in Punch, the weeklies, the Sunday papers & over the radio—with Ted reading a story on the radio one day, & me reading a poem in a review on the next & maybe this public recognition of me as Ted’s wife & a poet in my own right also irked Olwyn.

The oddest thing is that the main crux of her fury stemmed from a visit she paid us last spring, just as I was expecting to go in to labor any day. She came to London for a weekend (I had visions of a sisterly interest in my feelings, confinement etc. etc. & projected my desire for a comforting woman relative onto her) & instead of coming alone, brought two friends—one of them a total stranger. They sat round & smoked & Olwyn talked to Ted about astrology. I served them all lunch; they stayed on, obviously expecting me to serve them all dinner. I suggested we go out for fish & chips. Olwyn, it turned out, wanted to live with us—in our two rooms (“you had plenty of room” she cried last week). I tried to explain that I wouldn’t want my own mother sleeping on the couch in the livingroom when I went into labor at home & at that point didn’t feel like waiting on houseguests, worried as I was about the hereditary possibility of having a mental defective like Ted’s two cousins. I have an odd feeling she wanted my baby to be her baby. Ted asked her to be godmother & I didn’t object, when the baby was born, although both of us agreed after this Christmas blowup that it was silly to have a godmother & spiritual guide for Frieda who honestly thought her mother was nothing more than a nasty bitch.

As you may imagine my old Wicked Witch trauma came into action again. All the bright right answers about my also being a daughter in the house, if only by law, and the suggestion that Olwyn marry and have a few babies before she lecture me about the meaning of womanhood—said themselves later in my head. She acted like a jealous mistress, down to the red-dyed hair—as if by treating me like dirt & Ted like Prince Charming, we must fall apart by sheer disparity. She also said I’d driven her from her own house, she ‘d never come home from Christmas again, now wouldn’t I be happy etc. The morning we left—neither Ted or I having slept & his mother having cried all night—she threw her arms around me, smiled, said “I ‘m sorry” & ran back to bed. I don’t quite know what she was sorry for: surely not for hurting me, or for saying the truth, but perhaps for showing herself in the open before Ted.

That evening, as Ted & his mother just sat round (much as they do when Ted’s idiot cousin comes for tea, greeting everything from her new diamond ring to her yowling “Shut up, damn you” or “I’m going to put my head in the gas oven” with smiling nods & “Now, now, Barbara”.) I put the baby to bed and went for a long walk in the full moon over the moors, utterly sick. What upset me most was that neither Ted nor his mother said anything. I simply said “Go on, Olwyn, tell me all of it.” Ted appeared with his nice sane art-teacher cousin in a car as I was nearing Scotland. He had evidently hit his sister & told her off after I’d gone. Later, he said what we’d just witnessed was a pathological case & that we’d better steer clear of Olwyn till she got married. Luckily I remembered your wise advice that the woman who shouts her head off most seems in the wrong regardless of who’s right & I was glad I hadn’t retorted to Olwyn in kind.

My question is: now what do I do? I honestly don ‘f feel I can “forgive & forget & go back to that fake relation of entertaining Olwyn while she talks to Ted through me & lets me wait on them both. I think that next Christmas we’ll stay here at home: I don’t want to live cramped under the same roof up there with Olwyn again, nor do I want her to get one-up on me by staying away and having all the relatives blame me for it, nor do I want to run into the round of double-flu the three of us came down with coming & going. I hope we can visit Yorkshire with mother this summer & continue our pleasant & happy relation with Ted’s parents & aunts uncles & cousins at nicer times of the year. Yet we are between Paris & Yorkshire & I half expect Olwyn to turn up here & start more trouble. The thing I dont want is what I think she dimly wants: that by my refusing to see her I drive her & Ted to having clandestine meetings, where I would then obviously appear a mean, domineering figure . I think that if she wants to come here or for Ted to come there that the baby & I should go along, although my presence is intolerable to her. Yet as long as Ted thinks we should steer clear of her I’m perfectly happy. Luckily he isn’t in doubt about who he’s married to, although he’s deeply hurt by the whole situation. Do you agree I should just shut up about it, never refer to it or try to underline Olwyn’s hatred—since I deeply feel Ted is with me and for me? What attitude should I take when we meet again? Generous, I suppose.

Earlier, I would have been seriously threatened by all this. As it is, I feel sickened enough, but somehow quite steady. My role as Ted’s wife, Frieda’s mother, a writer, me—is beginning to flower into what I always dreamed of. I think Olwyn would “take” me if I were, like most of Ted’s previous girlfriends a “mealymouthed little princess” (which is what she called them, scornfully). I may have gone through just this goody-goody stage with psuedo-mothers—Mrs. Prouty, Mary Ellen Chase, Mrs. Cantor ad inf, but I am not prepared to regress & efface myself with Olwyn. She has a queer way of trying to judge and bully our marriage: “You’re unhappily married, why don’t you buy a house in the country, London is so ugly…” and so on. If I felt worried by this, I would be worried about being worried. We want a town house, a Cornwall seaside house, a car & piles of children & books & have saved about $8 thousand simply out of our writing in the past five years toward these dreams & feel in the next five years we may nearly approximate them. This is our business, & the lord knows our life together since Frieda’s arrival has been full of fun & happiness… as if she, by her droll, adorable otherness opened a whole new world for the two of us. She’s like a sort of living mutually-created poem who will, of herself, find a shape, a rhythm & who seems to thrive on the love and games and words we share with her. I think at last that I may break into the women’s magazines over here with stories—I have a very encouraging agent (my ultimate aim is the good old LHJ and Sat EvePost) and that this four-hour-a-day stint I put in is utterly consistent with being a good mother: I have a career which is fun & which I respect myself for having & which is a home-career: I’m always on hand for crises, meal-making and childcare and flexible enough to dovetail these with my own work. I also think my whole mind is more lively and inquiring and interested in other mothers and other people because of my new direction (as distinct from the slice-of-life arty story I used to try to do). And the LHJ seems a lot healthier to me than the I-remember-when-I-was-a-child-in-Westchester-county/Bangok/Tibet etc. that one finds in the estimable New Yorker.

Anyhow, my first American ladies’ magazine story will be dedicated to you: it was you started me reading the LHJ. Please excuse the single-spaced ^[rant + write if you’ve a minute.

Love, Sylvia Hughes

 

PS . One small footnote that made me feel I wasn’t quite alone in Olwyn’s black book. Ted told me that she was “even worse” (god save her) to her other sister-in-law, a bouncing, blond extrovert Australian who married her other brother (older by eight years). Evidently she so dug in to this poor girl during her first visit to England & her husband’s family that Joan packed her bags in tears & Ted just rescued her from the railway station as she headed back to Australia. As Ted said, “if she did that to Joan, not caring much about Gerald & never writing him, you can imagine how much more she resents you.” I certainly can. She writes Ted a voluminous, loving, intimate letter once a week and goes desperate if he doesn’t reply in kind. I remember your saying when I spoke of their childhood intimacy that this sort of thing never ends or undoes itself. I’m willing to accept this, as I would not be if Ted seemed more ambivalent in his emotional ties. But what about the future? I can quite imagine Olwyn marrying a man she hates, or committing some other symbolic suicide —her outbreak in Yorkshire was a form of self-mutilation: I forced her into her ugly temper, her exile from her own house & so on.

Anyhow, enough of that. I would appreciate a straightforward word from you. I feel I’ve come a long way since the last bout with Olwyn, but have a long way to go yet before I become the wise wife I’d like to grow into.

You should see Frieda: four teeth, two top & bottom, she stands & walks round her crib and pen holding on, plays with her tub-duck, squeaky rag chicks & bears & has a huge appetite. People still stop in the street to exclaim over her big blue eyes which is heartening as I think she is doomed to straight-as-a-stick brown hair like Ted & me. She shows a marked liking for books—even if her interest is mainly crumpling the crackly pages.  S.