After it was all over, I couldn’t look at anyone. I was crying because it was like a purge, the buildup of unbelievable tension, then the release, as of the soul of Joan at the stake. I walked for an hour around Central Park in the dark, just thinking, and my date kindly took me for a ride in one of those horse cabs around the park, which was the slow-paced, black-and-white balance I needed to the picture. I fed the horse a lump of sugar I’d saved from lunch and felt much better.
[Throughout her illness and this winter of 1954, Gordon Lameyer—one of her favorite boyfriends—wrote her faithfully, which gave her much support. Sylvia now found a good balance of work, play, and dating. Her self-discipline and confidence were steadily developing. Following the instructions of Dr. B., she charted each day, checking off as an item was accomplished—a practice she followed the rest of her life.]
APRIL 16, 1954
To: Dear Mummy FROM: me
SUBJECT: Odds and ends DATE: April 16, 1954
… Today I cut because I wrote my first poem, a sonnet, that I have written since last May! To be sure, I astringently revised several of my poems this past month (the second one I’m including has six new lines and six old revised and rearranged ones. I think it’s my best so far for both thought content and sound—a union of both, not just a hyperdevelopment of one. Tell me what you think of them). But “Doom of Exiles” is All New …
DOOM OF EXILES
Now we, returning from the vaulted domes
Of our colossal sleep, come home to find
A tall metropolis of catacombs
Erected down the gangways of our mind.
Green alleys where we reveled have become
The infernal haunt of demon dangers;
Both seraph song and violins are dumb;
Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers.
Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.
Still, stubbornly we try to crack the nut
In which the riddle of our race is shut.
While I have not got a paying Press Board job next year … I am the correspondent to the New York Tribune, which should be good experience, even if it doesn’t pay money.
I am so happy about the prospect of my thesis on Dostoevsky, and also of my rooming with Nancy Hunter, who is now my dearest friend … Nancy is writing a thesis on “History of Ethical Culture,” and I am so elated that with Marty and Clai [Smith classmates] gone that I have found such a beautiful, brilliant girl to be my confidante and belle amie!
APRIL 19, 1954
Dearest Mother,
… Met Richard Sassoon (whose father is a cousin of Siegfried Sassoon)—a slender Parisian fellow who is a British subject and a delight to talk to …
… Am still chatting with Dr. Booth [the college psychiatrist] once a week—mostly friendly conversations as I really feel I am basically an extremely happy and well-adjusted buoyant person at heart—continually happy in a steady fashion, not ricocheting from depths to heights, although I do hit heights now and then.
Love, sivvy
{Telegram}
APRIL 30, 1954
SMITH JUST VOTED ME SCHOLARSHIP OF $1250. MORE BIRTHDAY GREETINGS.
SYLVIA.
MAY 4, 1954
Just a note in the midst of a rigorously planned schedule from now till reading period and exams to say that I am fine. Had a good Saturday with Sassoon up here—most unique—another bottle of exquisite Bordeaux wine and a picnic of chicken sandwiches in a lovely green meadow. Strange and enchanting evening spent in farmhouse while waiting for Sassoon and tow truck to get his car out of quagmire on rutted dirt road. Four intriguing people who were evidently captivated by my peculiar arrival in the dark of night, hair damp with rain. They called me “Cinderella” and treated me like a queen till Sassoon came back with the reclaimed Volkswagen—a unifying episode of crisis!
Wonderful letter from Gordon, who is gradually changing to favor teaching (!)—my letters, subtle as they are, seem to be exerting influence. Also, I hope to know him on deeper, more mature levels than I was capable of last summer. See you Sat. the 15th.
x x sivvy
UNDATED; ARRIVED IN EARLY MAY 1954
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! … I’m going to New Haven to see Sassoon for a final party … should be absorbing as both Sassoon and his roommate … claim to be intensely in love with me. It’s a bit disconcerting to get passionate, metaphysical love letters from the same mailbox and two antagonistic roommates. To top it off, Nancy Hunter and the third roommate have been “partners” for years.
Anyhow Sassoon and I are driving to NYC to celebrate our farewell party (Sassoon leaves for Europe in a short while).
… Nancy is coming [for a visit in our home] from June 1 to 5. Her birthday is June 3, and I want to have a big steak dinner and cake surprise. I do love her!
x x x Sivvy
MAY 20, 1954
… Just a note in the appropriate midst of Escape from Freedom to let you know I won one poetry prize this year on the basis of my sonnet “Doom of Exiles,” which I wrote this spring. Only $20, I think, but it will keep me in new shoes for Marty’s wedding. Also, I just got elected president of the Alpha Phi Kappa Psi Society, honorary society of the arts, which has the advantage of being a very honorary post with a minimum of work and a solid gold, ruby-studded pin from Tiffany’s, which is handed down from president to president each year—minor events compared to the splash last year, but events nevertheless. Tomorrow I have sherry with Mr. Gibian, my thesis advisor. Then the reign of terror: exams. See you in a week.
x x x Sivvy
This, too, was a very turbulent summer. Sylvia returned from Smith with her hair bleached. Although initially shocked, I had to admit it was becoming. It was more than a surface alteration; she was “trying out” a more daring, adventuresome personality, and one had to stand by and hope that neither she nor anyone else would be deeply hurt. She strove for (and achieved) competency in her various undertakings—domestic and scholarly. She would be disarmingly confiding, then withdraw, and I quickly learned that it was unwise to make any reference to the sharing that had taken place.
The duodenal ulcer I had developed during the strenuous years of my husband’s illness (1936–1940), and which had caused internal hemorrhaging several times, had been quiescent for the most part in the 1950s—that is, until the time of Sylvia’s breakdown in the summer of 1953. In 1954, in an attempt to recover again, I took the summer off and joined my parents in a rented cottage on Cape Cod.
Sylvia, after the academic year at Smith closed in May, visited with friends in New York, attended several weddings, then returned to our home in Wellesley to “keep house” until she would join her friends in a Cambridge apartment and attend summer school at Harvard.
Sylvia at the beach, summer 1954 (photo: Gordon Lameyer)
WELLESLEY, MASS.
AUGUST 30, 1954
Dearest Mother,
Thought I’d sit down on this cold, clouded day to write you a note about affairs here since last I talked to you. Practically speaking, all has run off well. I’ve cooked meals for Gordon all weekend and learned a good deal.
We had a very lazy weekend, doing absolutely nothing except eating, talking, reading, sunning, and listening to records, and I again realized that it takes a few weeks of utter relaxation to put one in shape in between big pushes of work.
… We ended by driving to Dr. B.’s ourselves Friday—luckily, because my talk with her lasted longer than usual. I do love her; she is such a delightful woman, and I feel that I am learning so much from her.
… I was in a mood to pamper myself this weekend and so went to bed early and read J. D. Salinger and Carson McCullers’ short story collections in the sun. I just didn’t feel like disciplining myself to more difficult intellectual reading. This coming week, however, I hope to start Dos
toevsky in Cambridge and pick up German again, which I dropped for this week after the B exam, as if I’d been burned….
… I do want you to know how I appreciate time for a retreat of sorts here. Of course, the house is lonely without you, but I have been such a social being so continually since last winter (the month of June being an intensification, not a cessation, of my social obligations and contacts) that I really feel the need to be in a social vacuum by myself for a few days when I [can] move solely at my own lazy momentum with no people around. Naturally, it is only too easy to want company to alleviate the necessity for self-examination and planning, but I am at the point now where I have to fight for solitude, and it thus becomes a precious, if challenging, responsibility.
My main concern in the next year or two is to grow as much as possible, to find out, essentially, what my real capabilities are, especially in writing and studying, and then to play my future life in consistency with my abilities and capacities. This is a very important time for me, and I need as much space and concentrated solitude for working as possible. I feel that you will understand …
If I can learn to create lives, stories, and excitement out of myself without depending on external stimuli as shots-in-the-arm, but rather as provocative-yet-dispensable additions to a life already whole and rich in itself, then I will be surer that I am maturing in the direction I want to go.
Meanwhile, I want you to know that I love you really very much and have wished occasionally that I could just whisk on a magic carpet to the Cape to give you an impulsive bearhug, because you are, and always will be, so dear to my innermost heart.
Much love to all.
Sivvy
SEPTEMBER 27, 1954
… My main bother this month is my Fulbright application. I’ve had numerous interviews with the head of the graduate office and all my former professors, all of which have at least resulted in most gratifying results: Elizabeth Drew, Newton Arvin, and Mary Ellen Chase have agreed to write my letters of recommendation, and as they are all very big names in their field internationally, I should have an advantage there that might compensate for my mental hospital record. I think I definitely am going to write Dr. B. for my personal reference as I have to tell about McLean anyway, and a letter from her would serve the double purpose of eloquent recommendation and also of leaving no doubt as to the completeness of my cure. In addition to the fantastic red tape of the Fulbright, all of which is due in a month, I am applying separately to both Oxford and Cambridge, my two choices for university, through the American Association of University Women, since often Fulbright recipients are arbitrarily placed and I want either of these two erudite institutions—so that makes about 12 letters of recommendation, 3 health exams, 12 statements of purpose, etc. You can see how I’d love a private secretary! However, I hope to be able to have several photostats made of my three Big letters, so I can just send them out. Fortunately, my applications to Harvard, Yale, and Columbia don’t have to be in till the middle of winter. (Harvard is the only place I really want to go!) …
… I’m busy making a bibliography for my reading, after which I’ll plunge into skimming through all the works of Feodor D. in preparation of a detailed study of his Double characters….
I hope to get over this cold soon, but my schedule is settling out well, so that I feel psychically happy if physically nasty. My brown-haired personality is most studious, charming, and earnest. I like it and have changed back to colorless nail polish for convenience and consistency. I am happy I dyed my hair back, even if it fades and I have to have it touched up once or twice more. I feel that this year, with my applying for scholarships, I would much rather look demure and discreet.
Your own sivvy
Sylvia during “the platinum summer,” 1954 (photo: Gordon Lameyer)
OCTOBER 13, 1954
Dearest Mother,
… Now I think it is the time for me to concentrate on the hard year ahead, and I do so, although it means sacrificing the hours spent in pleasant frivolity over coffee and bridge—but I feel that the work I’m doing now is most important for the last push of my senior year—and I know how to have happy gay times when I really want to.
… I know that underneath the blazing jaunts in yellow convertibles to exquisite restaurants I am really regrettably unoriginal, conventional, and puritanical basically, but I needed to practice a certain healthy bohemianism for a while to swing away from the gray-clad, basically-dressed, brown-haired, clock-regulated, responsible, salad-eating, water-drinking, bed-going, economical, practical girl that I had become—and that’s why I needed to associate with people who were very different from myself. My happiest times were those entertaining in the apartment [the preceding summer, at Cambridge, Mass., while attending Harvard summer school], where I could merrily create casseroles and conversation for small intimate groups of people I like very much and that served as a balance in the midst of the two extremes.
… I am a firm believer in learning to be inventive and independent the hard way—with little or no money, and I hope I can continue to investigate life’s chances and try to be so even though inside I long for comforting security and someone to blow my nose for me, just the way most people do. I was proud of learning to cook and take care of bills this summer, but that is only the beginning. If only England would by some miracle come through, I would be forced shivering into a new, unfamiliar world, where I had to forge anew friends and a home for myself, and although such experiences are painful and awkward at first, I know, intellectually, that they are the best things to make one grow—always biting off just a slight bit more than you chewed before and finding to your amazement that you can, when it comes right down to it, chew that too!
… Right now it seems as if it is impossible that I [will] ever have a well-written thesis done, because now all reading is apparently unrelated (except that it is all about doubles and very exciting in itself) and thoughts are yet in embryo. The rough draft of my first chapter is due in a week from this Friday, and I am wondering if I can say anything original or potential in it, as I feel always that I have not enough incisive thinking ability—the best thing is that the topic itself intrigues me and that no matter how I work on it, I shall never tire of it. It is specific, detailed, and with a wealth of material; but, of course, I don’t know yet what precise angle I’ll handle it from. I’m taking the double in Dostoevsky’s second novelette, The Double, and Ivan Karamazov (with his Smerdyakov and Devil) in “The Brothers” as cases in point and think I shall categorize the type of “double” minutely, contrasting and comparing the literary treatment as it corresponds to the intention of psychological presentation. In conjunction with this, I’ve been reading stories all about doubles, twins, mirror images, and shadow reflections. Your book gift, The Golden Bough, comes in handy, as it has an excellent chapter on “the soul as shadow and reflection.”
… Do write often and give my love to all.
Your own sivvy
OCTOBER 15, 1954
… Went up to have a talk with Miss Mensel yesterday, and she was just dear. I was beginning to feel concerned about senior expenses and all the college and house dues coming up, so decided to get a few little jobs to cover some of my spending money. I am now going to spend 1½ hours each Monday afternoon reading aloud to a blind man, starting next week. I also am going baby-sitting twice next week and spent two hours today proofreading copy for the college directory. Miss Mensel said that I was slated for a gift of $10 from the “riotous living” fund, which I was most interested to learn about. I decided, inwardly, that when I start earning money, I’d like to send at least $10 a year for Miss Mensel to give some scholarship girl to spend on a play, or put toward a weekend away, or something impractical like silver dance slippers—they have been so wonderful to me! She also said that I shouldn’t leave my $50 deposit for scholarships as they will ask me to, but that I will need it to cover my senior expenses, which is a help.
Mary Ellen Chase has been just wonderful about m
y Fulbright application. She is going to write both to Oxford and Cambridge for me with Miss Drew, and from what she says, she seems to have no doubts about my getting in! She says the English universities will give me time to write, travel, and are nowhere as rigid with planning time as America’s enormous grad schools, and from her accounts of Cambridge, England, I just languished with wishful thinking.
… In connection with this [thesis] topic, I’m reading several stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann; Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Poe’s William Wilson; Freud, Frazer, Jung, and others—all fascinating stuff about the ego as symbolized in reflections (mirror and water), shadows, twins—dividing off and becoming an enemy, or omen of death, or a warning conscience, or a means by which one denies the power of death (e.g., by creating the idea of the soul as the deathless double of the mortal body). My thesis, as I see it now, will only mention the philosophic and psychological theories (there are thousands) and will deal specifically with the type of Double in these two novels of D. and the literary methods of presenting them.
Needless to say, this year will be just hard work. But, except for my treading water precariously in German, I Love to Study! I am so happy with my brown hair and my studious self! I really can concentrate for hours on end and am hoping that I can justify my topic by doing it well.
Be good to yourself, dear mother, and know how much I look forward to seeing you well and happy when I come home Thanksgiving—I hope this year will be an unclouded Thanksgiving for all of us!
Best love to all—
sivvy
OCTOBER 25, 1954
… Really, mother, I am so happy and fortunate in my topic: it lends itself to writing and is so fascinating that my interest will never become dulled no matter how [much] I work on it continually. Except for a brilliant long essay on “the double” by Otto Rank, no book has been devoted to it, and Mr. Gibian says he thinks it would be a good topic for a graduate thesis or even for a book! I have fallen in love with it and feel reasonably sure that if I revise and rethink, I can write a good thesis.