… I am going to do a series of sketches with a local-color article which may be sent to the Monitor. This is The Place to write. We have just been resting the last two days, getting rid of the last months’ tension and exhaustion. Both of us got sunstroke our first day, Ted burning an excruciating red, and me getting that terrible siege of dysentery, which leaves one utterly weak. Last night, however, he hypnotized me to sleep, and I woke up completely cured and feeling wonderful …
We are utterly happy … and I can’t imagine how I ever lived without him. I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him, how to please him, to make a comfortable place for him; and I am free … from that dread narrowness which comes from growing self-centeredness. He is kind and thoughtful, with a wonderful sense of humor …
We have figured that it would be good for me to write a series of stories for the women’s magazines about Americans abroad, because I am very good at local color and also can write dramatic contrast plots where the native scene gives rise to a parallel in psychological conflict. I’m going to begin one on the Madrid bullfights this week. We went last Sunday evening, and I am glad that Ted and I both feel the same way: full of sympathy for the bull. I’d imagined that the matador danced around with the dangerous bull, then killed him neatly. Not so. The bull is utterly innocent, peaceful, taunted to run about by the many cape-wavers. Then a horrid picador on a horse with a straw-mat guard about it stabs a huge hole in the bull’s neck with a pike from which gushed blood, and men run to stick little colored picks in it. The killing isn’t even neat, and with all the chances against it, we felt disgusted and sickened by such brutality. The most satisfying moment for us was when one of the six beautiful doomed bulls managed to gore a fat, cruel picador, lift him off the horse; … he was carried out, spurting blood from his thigh. My last bullfight. But I’ll now write a story with it as a background. We plan to write a good four to six hours a day in a rigid routine for the next two months—at last. Bliss.
Wish you could spend your last week here instead of England…. Do try, even if only for a few days. You’d love it and could swim and sun and I’d cook here. You could take a train to Madrid and fly from there to London. Ted says to take it easy, gaze at greenery; sends love.
x x x sivvy
UNDATED; POSTMARKED JULY 14, 1956,
FROM BENIDORM
Dear Warren,
… It seems so natural for me now to write about Ted and me without describing him, for I can’t imagine how I ever lived without him…. marrying a fine writer is the best thing I could have ever done. We are perfectly congenial, enjoying communicating with the natives, disliking parties and superficial cocktail affairs, loving the simple, rich, inward life, devoting most time to writing, loving good, simple cooking, reading and learning languages. Ted is the only man I’ve ever met whom I’d rather be with than alone; it is like living with the male counterpart of myself. He knows all about so many things: fishing, hunting, birds, animals, and is utterly dear.
We finished typing a manuscript of about 30 of his best poems and sent them off from Paris to a contest in America….
… What a husband! You MUST come meet him. Write me, Mrs. Sylvia Hughes or Mrs. Ted Hughes, c/o the address on the letterhead. PLEASE COME.
JULY 25, 1956
Dearest Mother,
… I was so happy to get your wonderful letters about your trip and only wish that you could manage to turn the last week of it toward us in Spain. If only we could have foreseen the kind of establishment we’d be in! I wish you could see us now….
How can I tell you how wonderful it is here? [They had moved to another house.] For the first time in a year, I have come to rest. Two [potentially rich] summer months still lie ahead. All the change and furor of this past year in which I don’t think I’ve really ever rested, going from a tiring term to even more tiring traveling vacations, are melting into one. Our house is cool as a well, stone tiled, quiet, with a view of blue mountains and even a corner of the sea. Our front porch is shaded by a grape arbor, pungent with geraniums. Our furniture is dark, heavy walnut, which is pleasant against the white plaster walls. We don’t see a tourist from morning till night.
Ted and I are just coming into our own. We have figured out a rigorous schedule which is at last beginning to be realized. Here is a day in the life of the writing Hugheses: We wake about seven in the morning, with a cool breeze blowing in the grape leaves outside our window. I get up, take the two litres of milk left daily on our doorstep in a can and heat it for my café-con-leche and Ted’s brandy-milk … [to accompany] delectable wild bananas and sugar. Then we go early to market, first for fish … it is fascinating, because every day brings a different catch. There are mussels, crabs, shrimp, little baby octopuses, and sometimes a huge fish which they sell in steaks. I generally make egg and lemon mixture, dip them in that and flour and fry them to a golden brown. Then we price vegetables, buying our staples of eggs, potatoes, tomatoes and onions (see we each have an egg and a good portion of meat a day). If only you could see how fantastically we economize. We go to the one potato stand that sells a kilo for 1.50 instead of 1.75 pesetas and have found a place that charges a peseta less (about 2½ cents) for butter. I hope that never again in my life will I have to be so tight with money. We will one day have a great deal, I am sure of it …
… Ted and I write, he at the big oak table, I at the typewriter table by the window in the dining room (our writing room) from about 8:30 till 12. Then I make lunch and we go to the beach for two hours for a siesta and swim when the crowds are all gone home and have it completely to ourselves. Then two more hours of writing from 4 to 6, when I make supper. From 8 to 10 we study languages, me translating Le Rouge et Le Noire and planning to do all the French for my exams this summer; Ted working on Spanish. Then, if there is time, we walk through the moonlit almond groves toward the still purple mountains where we can see the Mediterranean sparkling silver far below.
I am just beginning to get the feel of prose again, going through that very painful period of writing much bad, uneven prose to get back in story form as I was when I was doing the “Mintons” and those [stories] for Seventeen. I am working on the bullfight one now and have a terrific idea for a humorous Ladies’ Home Journal story called “The Hypnotizing Husband,” which, alas, I won’t be able to finish till this fall at Cambridge, because I want to read up on a lot of hypnotism stunts to make it ring true. It is a great idea and keeps coming at me while I’m cutting beans, etc. Ted is now doing the last chapter of the most enchanting children’s book ever. Every day he reads me a new chapter or two … you would love them. They are so beautiful I just laugh and cry. I am sure it will become a children’s classic….
Ted and I have decided to go stay with his family for the week before I go back to Cambridge and tell them we are married. I have been feeling very badly about his writing them as if he were alone, and he was sorry he hadn’t told them when we were married … so he is writing them, and I will go meet my new parents-in-law in September.
In spite of the discouraging rejections which arrive daily (we can’t afford stamps to send stuff out Spanish airmail to America now, so are piling up manuscripts till this fall), Ted has had one more piece of good news: The Nation has enthusiastically accepted his poem “The Hag,” so that is two poems, and we share one magazine! Next year will be most fruitful, I feel. I should write ten stories this summer, and Ted, two short books at least … We are very happy even in these lean times. How I look forward to America and my friends and the Cape next year! My life has been like the plot of a movie these past years: psychological, romance, and travel thriller. Such a plot. Do write and take care of yourself.
Love from us both—
Sivvy
AUGUST 2, 1956
Dearest Mother,
… Do let me know when you plan to announce my “engagement.” Perhaps early in October would be best when I have been back in Cambridge and
had time to write the Cantors, Marty Plumer, etc. If Uncle Frank gives me away and Warren is best man (I do hope dear Patsy can be a bridesmaid) all strain should be lifted, since everyone is in the family. I look more forward to this wedding than I can say, for it is the beginning of our real life … with the burdens of the present lifted.
I do hope we can get good teaching jobs at the same college. With Ted’s poems in The Nation and Poetry … he should be helped a good deal. He is the most brilliant man I’ve ever met and so unassuming about his knowledge that I’ll have to help his applications by making him put all his assets down. He literally knows Shakespeare by heart and is shocked that I have read only 13 plays. He is going to help me on dating literature (part of the Cambridge exams) at his home and is making me really think and write deeply. I could never get to be such a good person without his help. He is educating me daily, setting me exercises of concentration and observation. This bullfight story is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written with the action descriptions. It made me realize that his vision is really photographic, while mine is inclined to be an impressionist blur, which I am gradually clarifying by exercise and practice…. Do write soon.
Much love,
Sivvy
HOTEL DES DEUX CONTINENTS
PARIS, FRANCE
AUGUST 25, 1956
Dearest of Mothers,
It is now Saturday the 25th and Warren is sitting on our bed reading your letter while Ted is at the bowl scrubbing the last dirt out of his shirt, which only his hands are strong enough to get clean. Our trip up was really wearying, but much of it fun. I enjoyed the last week in Benidorm more than any yet, as if I were just coming awake to the town and went about with Ted doing detailed pen-and-ink sketches while he sat at my side and read, wrote, or just meditated. He loves to go with me while I sketch and is very pleased with my drawings and sudden return to sketching. Wait till you see these few of Benidorm—the best I’ve ever done in my life, very heavy stylized shading and lines; very difficult subjects, too: the peasant market (the peasants crowded around like curious children, and one little man who wanted me to get his stand in, too, hung a wreath of garlic over it artistically so I would draw that); a composition of three sardine boats on the bay with their elaborate lights, and a good one of the cliff-headland with the houses over the sea. I’m going to write an article for them and send them to the Monitor. I feel I’m developing a kind of primitive style of my own which I am very fond of. Wait till you see. The Cambridge sketch was nothing compared to these. Ted …wants me to do more and more….
The trip to Paris was exhausting, leaving at three in the afternoon and getting in at nine the next morning. We were stiff and cramped, but revived over breakfast on the train and had a delightful, gray morning sitting by the Seine, watching the fishermen on the bank and the women on the barges hanging out washing. Such a joy to have subtle, gray weather after the blank blazing sun. Life is so much heightened by contrasts. I am actually looking extremely forward to going up to Ted’s wuthering-heights home next week. For all my love of the blazing sun, there is a lack of intellectual stimulus in countries as hot as Spain.
Warren arrived early yesterday morning, and we fed him breakfast and made him take a nap all afternoon….
… Paris is not French Paris; the only language you hear is English, and I am glad that Ted and I can give Warren the atmosphere as we know it, not as the tourists find it. Hope we can live here a year some day (but not in July and August), because of the continuous fine movies, plays, and art exhibits. I really love this city above any I’ve ever been in; it is dear and graceful and elegant and what one makes it. I could never live in London or New York or Madrid, or even Rome, but here, yes….
Hope your trip back was not full of mal de mer; rest before school. We all love you dearly …
Sivvy
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
SEPTEMBER 2, 1956
Dearest Mother,
I wish you could see your daughter now, a veritable convert to the Brontë clan, in warm woolen sweaters, slacks, knee socks, with a steaming mug of coffee, sitting upstairs in Ted’s room, looking out of three huge windows over an incredible, wild, green landscape of bare hills, crisscrossed by innumerable black stone walls like a spider’s web in which gray, woolly sheep graze, along with chickens and dappled brown-and-white cows. A wicked north wind is whipping a blowing rain against the little house, and coal fires are glowing. This is the most magnificent landscape … incredible hills, vivid green grass, with amazing deep-creviced valleys feathered with trees, at the bottom of which clear, peat-flavored streams run.
Climbing along the ridges of the hills, one has an airplane view of the towns in the valleys. Up here, it is like sitting on top of the world, and in the distance the purple moors curve away. I have never been so happy in my life; it is wild and lonely and a perfect place to work and read. I am basically, I think, a nature-loving recluse. Ted and I are at last “home.” …
Ted’s parents are dear, simple Yorkshire folk, and I love them both. We live upstairs in Ted’s old room, which I have for my workroom, and he writes in the parlor downstairs. His father, a white-haired, spare, wiry fellow, has a little tobacconist’s shop downtown, and his mother is plumpish, humorous, with marvelous, funny tales of neighbors and a vivid way of describing things. She has a tiny kitchen, and I cook for Ted and me. She loves pottering about, making us starchy little pottages and meat pies. (I’ll be so happy to have an American kitchen … with orange juice and egg beater and all my lovely supplies for light cookies and cakes!)
I think they both like me … Ted’s marvelous millionaire [an exuberant exaggeration] Uncle Walt … took us over to Wuthering Heights Friday in his car. He is a powerful, heavy man with a terrific, dramatic sense of humor, and we got along fine. We had a picnic in a field of purple heather; and the sun, by a miracle, was out among luminous white clouds in a blue sky. There is no way to Wuthering Heights except by foot for several miles over the moors. How can I tell you how wonderful it is. Imagine yourself on top of the world, with all the purplish hills curving away, and gray sheep grazing with horns curling and black demonic faces and yellow eyes … black walls of stone, clear streams from which we drank; and, at last, a lonely, deserted black-stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy side of a hill. I began a sketch of the sagging roof and stone walls. Will hike back the first nice day to finish it.
Last night Ted and I hiked out at sunset to stalk rabbits in a fairytale wood, falling almost perpendicularly to a river valley below. I swung over cascading brooks on tree branches, stared at the gold sky and clear light; stopped in a farm to pet three black new-born kittens, admired cows and chickens. Ted, a dead-eye marksman, shot a beautiful silken rabbit, but it was a doe with young, and I didn’t have the heart to take it home to make a stew of it….
Best news came yesterday morning. Guess what, at last! A marvelous letter and check for $50 from Editor Weeks of the Atlantic for my poem “Pursuit,” which I sent you. And such a letter. I must quote: “We all think your poem ‘Pursuit’ a fine and handsome thing and look forward to the opportunity of publishing it on a page by itself in the Atlantic. Could you tell me about another poem of yours, not in this sheaf, ‘Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea,’ a copy of which was shown me by a mutual friend? It is really quite striking.”… Too bad Mlle has already published the latter poem, but I was delirious with joy at such a lovely letter. I’ve been badly needing some acceptance this year, and this will keep me going for another year. Keep an eye out for the issue and buy up lots of copies—a whole page to myself! Like Dylan Thomas, and for the same price! It is the first poem I wrote after meeting Ted, and his “Bawdry Embraced” in Poetry was dedicated to me…. I adore you, and my love to Warren. Do write and say you survived your crossing.
Much much love,
Sivvy
SEPTEMBER 11, 1956
Dearest Mother,
… I never thought I could like any country as well as the
ocean, but these moors are really even better, with the great luminous emerald lights changing always, and the animals and wildness. Read Wuthering Heights again here and really felt it this time more than ever.
… I can’t for a minute think of him [Ted] as someone “other” than the male counterpart of myself, always just that many steps ahead of me intellectually and creatively so that I feel very feminine and admiring.
There is an animal farm across the street where we’ve been seeing baby pigs, calves, kittens and puppies. I really want my children to be brought up in the country, so you must get a little place, too, somewhere in the country or by the sea (we’ll buy it when we are rich) where we can alternate leaving our … children with you and Mrs. Hughes while we take vacations or travel. Our life will be a constant adventure…. This year will be a tough discipline, but I need it and so does Ted. We’ve talked much about our wedding in June and both of us are determined to have it. We both long for a kind of symbolic “town” ceremony, and it may be the last time I see my friends and relatives together for many, many years. So plan on it definitely….
… Want simple ceremony with gala reception for all, lots of food and plenty of drink. Ted wants that, too, very much…. Can’t wait to get to America and cook for him.
Am sending three stories to Mlle, with fingers crossed—my stories. We are full of projects, plans and love…. VIVE THE 1957 WEDDING OF THE WRITING HUGHESES! All is perfectly quiet on the British front. Ted’s family’s dear. We both love you; can’t wait to share our life and times with you in America. Life is work and joy.