I am going to buy a huge scrapbook when I come home and paste up all Ted’s acceptances and important letters (they have only dinky scrapbooks here). These are things our grandchildren should treasure….
Imagine, the royalties on the book will be only 15 percent of 43 percent of the retail price (the 43 percent is the wholesale price!). On a $3 book this means the measly sum of about 10 cents a copy. To make the paltry sum of $100, you’d have to sell 1,000 books. I hope the reviewers make it a best-seller. They should! You see, selling the poems to magazines earns far far more. Poetry prizes, too. So the next book, we think, will be made up only after all the poems in it are already sold to magazines. I must find out about copyright laws. I think we both must get agents in New York now. Especially if I sell anything to the women’s magazines….
I accompany Ted to his play tonight and tomorrow—the first time I’ll have been at his school. We are so glad it is getting over with. Ted has been so deadly exhausted, I am insisting he gives up teaching on June 1, the day I finish my exams. We shall both take a rest-trip to Yorkshire to bid good-by to his parents and then, perhaps, visit Scotland. I have seen next to nothing of England’s natural beauty and feel I should. I am so prejudiced against it in everything else: politics, class-system, medical system, fawning literary cliques, mean-minded critics (the irate, nasty person-to-person letters the most respected critics—G. S. Fraser, Louis MacNeice, Spender, Lea vis, et al.—throw back at each other in the weekly papers are shockingly mean and narrow). Of course, for official purposes, I have found England heavenly (and, for myself, I have): the one place in the world that offered me the husband of my whole life and love and work…. I feel more in love with him now than I ever did before we were married. And this marvelous chance of both of us beginning from scratch and working up together has been magnificent….
x x x s.
TUESDAY NOON
MARCH 25, 1957
Dearest Mother,
This must be a gruelling time of year for everybody. Ted and I both were exhausted and blackly depressed this weekend as an aftermath of little sleep and a term’s accumulation of fatigue and last-minute slaving by both of us—Ted on his play, me on my papers and articles. Sunday loomed blacker than pitch, and it seemed an intolerable effort to move to go to bed. We took a long night walk and felt much freer and with early bed this week and me “free” from the paper-producing routine, and Ted’s play over, we improve rapidly. Both of us haven’t written anything to please ourselves for months, it seems, but now, suddenly with the clearing spring air, we feel much more optimistic. But so much still hangs fire—15 manuscripts of poems and stories and our two books: my poems and Ted’s animal fables.
Ted’s play enchanted me. I haven’t laughed so hard or enjoyed myself so much at a play since I’ve been here…. I never want Ted to have to undergo a year of strain like this again. I don’t care if he only gets a part-time free-lance job this next year. I want him to write above all. Both of us feel literally sick when we’re not writing…. Must read novels this summer: George Eliot, etc. Ted and I have read scarcely any novels. How we both look forward toward this summer! It hasn’t been an easy year for either of us.
Ted was very impressed about the news of Wilbur’s astounding fortunes. When I think that Wilbur was publishing his first book of poems at Ted’s age, ten years ago, I don’t feel we are so retarded. I am secretly hoping Ted will get a good college teaching job—maybe at Amherst the second year (if I’m asked back to Smith)—and will discover how unique the chance is for American poets, and even though we travel abroad, will want to come back. There is not a question of our living in England; both of us are eager to get out (although I am terribly fond of Cambridge). It’s Europe and America. Ted is so eager to go; he feels the opportunity there more and more, I think. And if I manage this year right—giving him time, leisure and peace to write (the Cape is perfect—your most significant present!), maybe he’ll want to center his life there. But one must never push him …
… I grind daily on the rough draft of my “novel”; I only know that it will cover nine months and be a soul-search, American-girl-in-Cambridge, European vacations, etc. If I do my daily stint, mere unrewritten blatting it out, I should have about 300 single-spaced pages by the time we sail for home—a ragged, rough hunk to work from this summer. Once I see what happens myself, I’ll start careful rewriting; probably chuck this and rewrite the whole mess …
I get courage by reading Virginia Woolf’s Writer’s Diary; I feel very akin to her, although my book reads more like a slick best-seller. Her moods and neuroses are amazing. You must read this diary; most illuminating….
x x x sivvy
MARCH 29, 1957
Mrs. Prouty was, of course, delighted to learn of Sylvia’s appointment to Smith, and wrote her a long congratulatory letter which concluded with, these intuitive remarks:
Dear Sylvia,
… There is no end to the thrilling things happening. It frightens me a little.
I am very proud of you, Sylvia. I love telling your story. Someone remarked to me after reading your poem in the Atlantic, “How intense.” Sometime write me a little poem that isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes. Much love and to Ted, too.
Olive Prouty
MONDAY A.M.
APRIL 8, 1957
Dearest Mother,
… Am at last coming out of a “ghastly stretch of sterility” put upon me by writing countless essays last term, taking all my writing energy. I just yesterday finished one of my best, about 56 lines, called “All the Dead Dears.”
I so appreciated your apropos quotes from Auden and Cronin; they help so much. Just to know it is normal to have cycles of feeling barren as hell sustains one. I am now growing more and more accustomed to it, but both Ted and I realize the fatality is to stop writing. We would go on, daily, writing a few pages of drivel until the juice came back, rather than stop, because the inertia built up is terrible to conquer. So, for our “health” we write at least two hours a day. I am plodding daily on my “novel” and have about 80 single-spaced pages ground out (actually 160 Ms. pages); my aim is 300 single-spaced pages by the time I come home. Then the blessed summer to ram it into shape.
I must say I have the most peculiar feeling about my book. I am grinding out a lot of tripe, having never written a novel, and, as Ted says, won’t know what I’m saying till I’ve written the first draft. But it’s a place to put everything in—a kind of repository for my thoughts and feelings and freeing them with this wonderful fluency. I have a feeling, in flashes, that I can make it a best-seller; but only with at least a year’s work. I’d love to dedicate it to Mrs. Prouty and hope I can get her to approve when it’s done….
… Got up at 4:30 a.m. this day with Ted and went for a long walk to Granchester before settling down to writing. I never want to miss another sunrise. First, the luminous blue light, with big stars hanging; then pinkness, spreading, translucent, and the birds beginning to burble and twit from every bramble bush; owls flying home. We saw over fifteen rabbits feeding. I felt a peace and joy, being all alone in the most beautiful world with animals and birds. Little shrews twitted from the tall grass, and we saw two lovely brown-furred water rats (remember The Wind in the Willows) feeding on the bank, then skipping into the water and swimming. You’d laugh, but I’m going to put this scene into my novel. We began mooing at a pasture of cows, and they all looked up, and, as if hypnotized, began to follow us in a crowd of about twenty across the pasture to a wooden stile, staring, fascinated. I stood on the stile and, in a resonant voice, recited all I knew of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for about twenty minutes. I never had such an intelligent, fascinated audience. You should have seen their expressions as they came flocking up around me. I’m sure they loved it! … Well, must be off to shop and laundry now. Am ripping through French translations of Baudelaire and Stendhal and feeling virtuous. What news of dear Warrie?
Lo
ve to you both, Sivvy
APRIL 13, 1957
Dearest, darling, adorable Mother,
It has been so lovely to get your happy letters this week. So glad Warren’s thesis is done and am sure it is brilliant, although far over both our heads….
We have had a rather taxing week, but with a nice climax today. Ted and I got four rejections between us on Tuesday (two each—our literary life is very symmetrical). Ted’s book of children’s fables (alas) they ultimately decided was “too sophisticated.” I’m going to keep on trying the big companies like Macmillan; small ones don’t take risks. If the Hobbit wasn’t “sophisticated,” what is? [Rejected, also,] some of Ted’s poems from the Saturday Review (Ciardi is making a big mistake in rejecting us. He’s “overstocked,” I bet—with his own poems!); some of my poems from the Paris Review, with a very nice letter asking me to send more; and two stories from the posh Sewanee Review with a rather amazing letter from the editor to the effect that my stories showed a “spectacular talent,” which from a conservative editor is rather encouraging.
Well, we weathered this news with typing and retyping sessions, sending five or six more Mss. out, and this morning got our reward—again, in a twin package—from, guess where—John Lehmann at the London Magazine! Our first real professional “British” acceptance, and it is the “Atlantic Monthly” of England! They accepted two of my poems: “Spinster” (the one favorably reviewed in the Sunday Times) and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” (about to be published also in the Antioch Review). They accepted a longish one of Ted’s, “Famous Poet,” and obviously felt they could not resist the pressure of such about-to-be-world-celebrated poets. At last! The halls of British conservatism have recognized us.
Of my two poems, the impeccable Mr. Lehmann wrote, “Your outstanding gift seems to me a sharply focussed truth of feeling and observation, at its most effective in ‘Spinster’ and ‘Black Rook’” We aren’t really bragging, but only childlikely happy our sweating and work-of-our-life is recognized. We still get on an average two rejections apiece to every acceptance.
The joy is, in these rejections, of people saying we have a gift. That’s all we need to know, although we do know it deep in ourselves. All that a gift demands to be recognized is constant deep thinking and sweating, continuous work. No public literary-lion life for us; although, on the occasion of a book-publishing, we will modestly appear, gaunt-cheeked and prophet-eyed, to partake of free champagne and caviar!
Both of us feel we are very late maturers … our own personalities are still squeaking new and wonderful to us.
… What fun we’ll have, clipping Ted’s reviews … We are going to catapult to fame, I predict. Simply because it means so little to us and our writing and being HEARD and READ is everything….
Much love, Sivvy
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
APRIL 28, 1957
Dearest Mother,
… I am living at the University library from morning to night … enjoying my work, really, steadily reading tragedy now, the Greeks, then on through 2,000 years up to Eliot, concentrating on several major figures: Corneille, Racine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Webster, Marlowe, Tourneur, Yeats, Eliot; there are so many. This tragedy paper (only a 3-hour exam for all that) is a fine help on my reading. I’d never read any of the plays before, really. This summer I must devour crucial novels. Ted and I have read hardly any prose.
… We’ll pack and get our stuff crated in the few days after we finish work and be off for the therapeutic Wuthering Heights country, when I hope to begin writing again. I feel seething when I’m not writing daily and am forced now to give it up for these next five weeks. But my novel becomes more and more exciting to me, and I hope to work on it all summer. We are already sending our manuscripts with the Wellesley address on return envelopes, so open anything that looks official to either of us and communicate the contents….
Ted’s visa seems to be for residence, with all that implies. I think he might be willing even to change citizenship, although I will not try to persuade him, because America is uniquely the country which gives its poets a kind of “patronage” at the universities … He has just written one of his best poems today (after a long dry spell) on the recent auto death of Roy Campbell.
… We plan, after two years, definitely to get writing fellowships to Rome. I hope you’ll brave the seas on a bigger ship then and spend at least the summer with us in a nearby villa! Ted enjoys your letters so much and says he is so happy I have such a lovely mother. I do think his parents are dear and we both have in common coming from good, solid stock where the sole endowments are talent and intelligence and health; name and money we’ll make ourselves, step by step, together.
x x x Your own Sivvy
MAY 7, 1957
Dearest, darling Mother,
How happy your letter made us this morning with the wonderful news of Warrie’s Fulbright! I’m writing him a note this morning, too, before I go biking off for my routine day …
This is one of those clear, rare, champagne-aired mornings which make me feel like a sinner against creation when I go into the huge factory-stacked library, not to glimpse the sun again before it sets, but my dreams of the moors and the Cape sustain me. I will not feel at all “guilty” in indulging in sun and sea there.
You know, I think that through our years of family scraping to get money and scholarships, etc., we three developed an almost Puritan sense that being “lazy” and spending money on luxuries like meals out or theater or travel was slightly wicked; and I think all three of us are being given the rare chance of changing into people who can experience the joys of new adventures and experiences. You are the lesson to us all. I really think you have grown in the past year at least 25 years younger in the sense that you are so wonderfully open to experience! So few women manage this. Ted and I look forward to having such fun with you this summer and next year, simply picnicking on Nauset Beach and swimming and talking and taking long walks.
We live very simply by nature, in our favorite old clothes and with our cheap, red wine for dinner and (this year, at least) no theater, movies or extras. But every now and then we believe in going out to dinner, or dressing up, as we did this last Saturday night, and going to a party. The editor of Gemini gave a cocktail party to all The Literati of Cambridge, and as Ted and I had never met him, we went; I, in that lovely pink knit dress I wore for my wedding and new white heels (what a blessing to wear heels with Ted and still be “little”) and a silver headband he’d bought me for a surprise at a time when I was depressed about exams. A most enlightening affair.
… Can’t wait to write on my novel this summer. I really feel I am going to do a fine one. All my love to you and our wonderful Warren. After all these years of work, sickness, death, and bearing others’ suffering, you must enjoy every minute of life with Warrie, Ted, and me.
x x x Sivvy
A handmade birthday card, 1957
UNDATED; POSTMARKED MAY 7, 1957
Dearest Warren,
… I live in dreams of the Cape and our summer … I’ll be reading madly in preparation for my courses at Smith and writing on my novel, tentatively to be called “Hill of Leopards,” about an American girl finding her soul in a year (or, rather, nine Fulbright months) at Cambridge and on the Continent. It will be very controversial as I intend to expose a lot of people and places. And start my new gospel, which is as old as native rituals, about the positive acceptance of conflict, uncertainty, and pain as the soil for true knowledge and life. How I long to begin it! Ted and I want to devote our lives to writing and travel and raising a family of at least four. He admires you very much and hopes you can take us both fishing on one of those ships on the Cape sometime. Ted loves to fish and is so marvelously restful to be with. How heavenly it will be.
I can’t wait to get out of this dusty, dirty, gloomy coal-bin of a house (except for the front room in which I am now writing) to go to the moors, then the Atlantic, then home, then the Cape. Smith scares me, but only
in a healthy way. I will gain the much-needed sense of “giving” and (for once) supporting myself, which I could not live without. I will work to really interest my students (I imagine I’ll have close to 100 in all!) and feel it will be a perfect way to “share” my Fulbright experience and learning, as well as by writing.
… I hope to break into the women’s slicks this summer. I just haven’t had the time to rewrite. The Ladies’ Home Journal liked my laundromat story (two people meet at a laundromat via a very funny 13-year-old girl, quiz-kid type, and fall in love finally) and said they’d look at it again if I rewrote the ending—no promises. Well, I sent it to Good Housekeeping and when it comes back will rewrite it. I think I should sell it somewhere, the setting is quite “original”; their motto is: LOVE LOVE LOVE: but not, please, in the same old setting—Love in jet-planes, Love on water-skis, Love in Sumner Tunnel (traffic jam, etc.), but never Love plain. So I put mustard, pepper and curry powder on it.
O the sun is so lovely, and I must bury my bleared eyes in 2,000 years of Tragedy. My life is just balancing till the end of the month. Then, whoopee! novels, stories, poems. I can feel them battering to get out. DO WRITE. We both send love and congratulations and an invisible rabbit’s foot for your exams.
Love,
Sivvy
FRIDAY A.M.
MAY 10, 1957
Dearest Mother,
Couldn’t resist sitting down and writing some more good news about my wonderful Ted which came this morning … FABER & FABER, the British publishing house, has just written to accept Ted’s poetry book for publication in England. Not only that, but Mr. T. S. Eliot (who is on their staff) read the book, and the publisher writes: “Mr. Eliot has asked me to tell you how much he personally enjoyed the poems and to pass on to you his congratulations on them.” …