… God, how I wish I could win the Mlle contest. This year would be so ideal while I’m still in touch with college…. Bye for a while,
Your busy loving, silvershod Sivvy
MARCH 6, 1953
Dear Mother,
As far as I’m concerned, things look very promising for a rich companionship between Mike [Myron Lotz] and me with the understanding that there are no strings attached and there is complete freedom for both of us … Mike and I don’t feel ready to make final choices for a few years yet … This is very nice, because I get a chance to see how Mike works out in Med. School and what he wants to do with the rest of his life. He is still very young at heart and changing into being a man and needs encouragement and affection, which I certainly am glad to give…. For me and for him, love is difficult to define, but it is a very slow, growing, rational thing. I have to know a great deal about anybody and be able to predict reasonably the future life I’d have before I could ever commit the next fifty years of my life.
MARCH 9, 1953
The most tantalizingly sad thing happened this afternoon. I really can’t help but sit down and immediately spill it over to you. I got my two villanelles back from The New Yorker today with a rejection that wasn’t even mimeographed, but that was written in pencil and initialed by one of the editors. It said, and I quote: “Although we were impressed by many things in ‘Doomsday,’ I’m sorry to say the final vote went against it, as well as the other poem. We were somewhat bothered by the two rhymes that break the scheme—especially ‘up,’ which is not even an assonant rhyme here. Do try us again and thanks for letting us see these.”
Honestly, I’ve never come so blasted close, and it’s almost worse than missing out altogether. “Final vote”! Those heartless men! Ah, well, to keep my courage up, I immediately sent them the third villanelle. The worst they can do is reject that, too.
MARCH 17, 1953
Dearest Progenitor,
Even though I am very weary and very longing for sleep and very behind in papers, I felt such a sudden burst of love and happiness and joy in love seething all day in me that I could not help but want to share some of it with you. There is so much to flow over merrily with, and I feel violets sprouting between my fingers and forsythia twining in my hair and violins and bells sounding wherever I walk.
Why should I be so elated even if tired? Because I have two good strong legs, the doctor and x-ray said so yesterday; because I revised my villanelles the way The New Yorker man suggested, and it is true they are much better and I am going to send them back and see what he says; because I will probably get the coveted position of Hampshire Gazette Correspondent for next year in the News Office, which will mean earning about $150 or $200—the most lucrative job in the office; because I have many good, warm friends—Marcia, Enid, and talented others; because one Myron Michael Lotz thinks I am brilliant-creative-and-beautiful-all-at-once; because one promising Raymond Wunderlich [of Columbia Medical School] has just written and asked me to come to New York sometime this spring for ballet and other cultural delights; because I just got a check from the Springfield Daily News and bought three coveted books and six modern art postcards at the Hampshire Bookshop: the huge black-and-white modern art-covered New Directions (14), James Joyce’s Dubliners [she planned to write her senior thesis on Joyce], and The Basic Writings of Freud; because life in general is rich and heterogeneous and promising if I work hard.
MARCH 14, 1953
Got back the Mlle manuscript today. This is a bad time for me as rejections go. Also, I don’t see how I have any sort of a chance to be an editor this June. Twenty top girls from Smith are trying out …
My personal rejection from The New Yorker has made me realize how hard I want to work at writing this summer. I’ll never get anywhere if I just write one or two stories and never revise them or streamline them for a particular market. I want to hit The New Yorker in poetry and the Ladies’ Home Journal in stories, and so I must study the magazines the way I did Seventeen. Speaking of Seventeen, I wrote them as you suggested … asking if I could submit stories and poems on a professional basis. It would be a great triumph for me to get a story in there on a regular basis. If I can consciously gear things to them the way I did that “Initiation” story, I don’t see why I couldn’t produce prolifically …
Your rejected daughter, Sivvy
UNDATED; POSTMARKED MARCH 21, 1953
Dear Warren,
… The great W. H. Auden spoke in chapel this week, and I saw him for the first time. He is my conception of the perfect poet: tall, with a big leonine head and a sandy mane of hair, and a lyrically gigantic stride. Needless to say he has a wonderfully textured British accent, and I adore him with a big Hero Worship. I would someday like to touch the Hem of his Garment and say in a very small adoring voice: Mr. Auden, I haveapomeforyou: “I found my God in Auden.”
He is Wonderful and
Very Brilliant, and
Very Lyric and Most
Extremely Witty.
… There are a million things I want to talk to you about, since I haven’t written you for a long time. Looks like you and I will both be home this summer, so I hope we can help mother with the cooking and work since grammy is evidently pretty out of the running now, and I look so forward to being with you all the summer: I hardly ever see you during the year, and you are still my Very Favorite Person! We will have a fun summer together. It will help the fact that my social life will obviously be Nil. At least now and then we can Do Boston together, alleys and all, because you are a Big Man and can protect me….
Much love,
Sivvy
{From a Smith College theme, “The Ideal Summer,” spring 1953:}
… I have run through my roster of friends, relatives, and favorite professors, and my choice for a fellow wanderer is, strange as it may seem, my 18-year-old brother, Warren….
… Warren and I have a rather wonderful friendship and enjoy each other as if we were chosen comrades, not merely related. Furthermore, Warren starts Harvard on scholarship next fall, and, as a culturally and intellectually stimulating companion, he is also ideal.
APRIL 11, 1953
Dearest Mother,
I am at present beginning a long, funny poem which the first stanza of I here reproduce. I am trying to get a rollicking rhythm. Sometimes, I fear, it is not only rollicking, but also supremely irresponsible:
Dialogue en Route
“If only something exciting would happen!”
Said Eve the elevator-girl ace
To Adam the arrogant matador
As they shot past the forty-ninth floor
In a rocketing vertical clockcase
Fast as a fallible falcon.
{Telegram}
APRIL 24, 1953
BIRTHDAY GREETINGS. MY PRESENT IS FOLLOWING NEWS. HARPERS MAGAZINE JUST GRACIOUSLY ACCEPTED THREE POEMS FOR 100 DOLLARS IN ALL. MADEMOISELLE SENT TEN DOLLARS FOR RUNNER-UP IN THIRD ASSIGNMENT. BEST LOVE TO YOU. SIVVY
APRIL 25, 1953
Dearest Mum,
Well, tomorrow is your birthday, and Harper’s conveniently came across just in time for me to tell you the news I wanted to: that I got my first real professional acceptance! Even now I still can’t believe it! Although the lovely check for $100 came today. The poems they accepted are two of the villanelles, “Doomsday” and the one you like so much, “To Eva Descending the Stair.” The third was one I wrote last spring, called “Go Get the Goodly Squab.” I was most surprised about that one because the Atlantic had already rejected it, and the Smith College Jury for the annual poetry contest overlooked it completely last year … It is one of my favorite exercises in sound, so I’ll be most pleased to see it in print in the future….
… Now I can really plan to live in Cambridge [for the summer], I think. In the same mail I got a $10 check for being one of the ten runners-up in Mile’s last assignment, so all my extra work and your kind typing really paid off.
… Mentally, I dedicate this
Harper’s triumph to you, my favorite person in the world.
… The Atlantic and The New Yorker remain my unclimbed Annapurnas. Of course, in Harper’s I shall be in excellent literary company. Really, I just couldn’t sleep all last night, I was so excited. Can’t you just hear the critics saying, “Oh, yes, she’s been published in Harper’s.” (Don’t worry, I’m not getting smug. I’m just happy that my hard work has gotten such a plum of a reward.)
x x x to my birthday mummy—Sivvy
APRIL 28, 1953
… Yesterday I was elected Editor of the Smith Review for next year—the one job on campus that I really coveted with all my heart. So now, with my prize financial job on the Gazette, I’m carrying my full number of points and have the two activities I … wanted above all.
Last night I will never forget. W. H. Auden came to our unit of Modern Poetry and for two hours sat and read and analyzed one of his longest poems … to hear the brilliant play of minds, epigrams, wit, intelligence and boundless knowledge was the privilege of my lifetime. Miss Drew’s living room took on the proportions of a book-lined sanctuary, and I never felt such exaltation in my life. The English Department in this place is unsurpassed anywhere, and this year, with the symposium and W. H. Auden, was a plumcake of letters and arts genii….
APRIL 30, 1953
… Tell me what you think about the poems … any resemblance to Emily Dickinson is purely intentional.
ADMONITION
If you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You’ll cut the chord
Articulating song.
If you flay a beast
To marvel at the mane
You’ll wreck the rest
From which the fur began.
If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.
PARALLAX
Major faults in granite
Mark a mortal lack;
Yet individual planet
Directs all zodiac.
Tempo of strict ocean
Metronomes the blood.
Yet ordered lunar motion
Proceeds from private flood.
Diagram of mountains
Graphs a fever chart;
Yet astronomic fountains
Exit from the heart.
Drama of each season
Plots doom from above;
Yet all angelic reason
Moves to our minor love.
VERBAL CALISTHENICS
My love for you is more
Athletic than a verb,
Agile as a star
The tents of sun absorb.
Treading circus tightropes
Of each syllable,
The brazen jackanapes
Would fracture if he fell.
Acrobat of space
The daring adjective
Plunges for a phrase
Describing arcs of love.
Nimble as a noun,
He catapults in air;
A planetary swoon
Could climax his career.
But adroit conjunction
Eloquently shall
Link to his lyric action
A periodic goal.
{Undated letter to Warren; written about May 12, 1953}
Dearest Harvard Man,
“Oh, I on-ly date a man if his shoes are white”—I am so proud of you that I can hardly keep from leaping up and down and shouting liddle ‘ip-‘oorays all over the Smith campus. So Harvard came across with a National! And best of all, they won’t Let You Work during the year. That is what I call princely….
Tell me, now, how much is left for you to cover? Will mother have to pay anything? I hope not, because she is really down to rock bottom, and I gather from her letters that she is having ulcer trouble, although she is very brave and gay about eating baby foods again. I hope that I too can pay for everything next year, in spite of summer school (I just wish Harvard would come across for me too on June 1!) and New York.
Now, I think you and I should have a plan to make mother rested and happy this summer, in spite of the fact that she is teaching. As you know, the house is being decorated (for which I’m infinitely glad, as now I can bring boys home without keeping the lights down very dim and hoping they won’t see the spots and tears in the wallpaper, and you can feel proud to bring girls home during college). And, obviously, this is a big financial chunk out of mother’s almost nonexistent bank account. So if we can continue to completely support ourselves these next years (if ONLY my True Story [she wrote several for True Story] would pay, I’d keep our pot of caviar boiling by writing more such sordid money makers). Ironically enough, all my attempts to earn money by prostituting my talent, e.g., by writing hundreds of Lucky Strike jingles, have been silent, while Big Money has come from all my attempts at artistic satisfaction without care for remuneration, e.g., Mlle and Harper’s.
One thing I hope is that you will make your own breakfasts in the a.m. so mother won’t have to lift a finger. That is the main thing that seems to bother her. You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually Kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease. My ambition is to earn enough so that she won’t have to work summers in the future and can rest, vacation, sun, relax, and be all prepared to go back to school in the fall. Hitherto, she’s always been rushed and tired, and her frailty worries me …
After extracting her life blood and care for 20 years, we should start bringing in big dividends of joy for her, and I hope that together we can maybe plan to take a week down the Cape at the end of this summer. What do you think about that?
If we could go after I get out of summer school at the last week in August, or right after Labor Day when expenses are down, we could read, relax, and just be together. I don’t know where the car will be, or what you think about it, but we could both chip in and treat her to a week in a cabin, maybe around Brewster, or Falmouth, or somewhere. Let me know what you think about this little light bulb of a plan….
… Really, you and I have it good. Food, clothes, best schools in the country—our first choices, and all sorts of prizes, etc. Seems we lead a charmed plathian existence. Just hope the world doesn’t blow up and queer it all before we’ve had our good hard lives lived down to the nub.
So much remains to talk about: philosophies of life, aims, attitudes. At least we can be best companions, all honesty and help each other. I am so proud of you and want the very best for you in the world. Hope that you can profit by all my mistakes, and a few of my lucks and successes!
Be good, and keep a cool and level head (soaking it in beer often helps).
One thing, when you get all success like us, you have to be damn careful because many people secretly would like to see you fall off your proud stallion into the mud, because, no matter how good friends they are, they can’t help but be a bit jealous. I find it expedient to keep quiet about the majority of my publications, for instance, because friends can rejoice with you for just so long without wishing they were in your place, and envying you in spite of themselves. It’s sad, but that’s the way it goes….
Much much love and more felicitations,
Your very proud
Sivvy
{Telegram to Sylvia from Mademoiselle}
[NO DATE]
HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE YOU HAVE WON A MADEMOISELLE 1953 GUEST EDITORSHIP. YOU MUST BE AVAILABLE FROM JUNE I THROUGH JUNE 26. PLEASE WIRE COLLECT IMMEDIATELY WHETHER OR NOT YOU ACCEPT AND IF YOU WANT HOTEL RESERVATION. GIVE MEANS AND COST OF TRANSPORTATION HERE AND HOME IN SEPARATE WIRE IF NECESSARY. LETTER FOLLOWS ON YOUR ACCEPTANCE WIRE. MARYBETH LITTLE, COLLEGE BOARD EDITOR
MAY 13, 1953
Dearest Progenitor,
… The month sounds strenuous b
ut challenging and lots of fun. I’ve already sent in the names of four writers, one of whom I will meet, interview and be photographed with. My tentative choices are: J. D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye and tremendous stories); Shirley “The Lottery” Jackson; E. B. White of New Yorker fame; and Irwin Shaw. Hope one of those luminaries consents to be seen with me….
MAY 15, 1953
I hope maybe you can write a bit this summer … articles about your teaching job … for one of the women’s magazines. I’d love to edit for you … Of course, sharpening up writing again, once it’s rusty, is very painful and almost prohibitive, as the “Oh, why should I waste my time doing something that will never be published” attitude is easy to have.
But you deserve to pamper yourself increasingly now that the hardest 20 years of your life are over, and you deserve all the returns you can get from your wonderful selfless work and help to Warren and me, who love and admire you more than anyone else … You have managed to create a warm, loving, intelligent family unit, where pride and love in mutual achievement make us all very close. I never know anyone for long before I start holding forth with pride about Grammy and Grampy and you and Warren. Smith and all the opportunities now opening only make me want to affirm my rich heritage all the more!
Love, Sivvy
[The two days at home between her last examination at Smith and her departure for New York were crammed with frantic activity, including the completion of an assignment for Mademoiselle.]