… Since last June Ted has sold fourteen poems, a broadcast poem and a book to two countries. I guaranteed fifteen poems sold in a year if he let me be his agent when I first met him, and he’s written his best since we’ve been working together … even as I have. I’ve had sixteen sales since August (just twice as many as I’d sold in the five years before meeting Ted) and many of these, like “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats,” were assignments Ted gave me last spring. If only I can get my book accepted in the next few months, it will be perfect.
My two main ambitions this summer (apart from preparing my courses at Smith and writing poems, naturally) are my novel and breaking into the women’s slicks finally. I feel years older than I was the summer I left and my stories which I wrote this year … are really much, much improved. If I devote my whole self and intelligence to it, I know I can make it, and five stories would be a year’s salary. Ted wants to make children’s books his other field … I am planning to try an article on Cambridge for Harper’s and a story on Cambridge for the Atlantic; both editors said they would be interested in seeing my results … The doors are open; one only has to slave and work and live for the art of writing, as well as living with the utmost integrity and emotional sympathy….
Much love,
Sivvy
MAY 24, 1957
Dearest Mother,
How lovely it was to get your letter this cold gray morning. Ted and I read it aloud over breakfast and both of us send congratulations and much love to our new Associate Professor! Really, though, you have long deserved it, I should think….
We were stunned this week to get the proofs of Ted’s book, not from Harper’s, but from Faber & Faber, one week after they’d accepted it! We’ve gone through and through it with a little, but incomplete, handbook page on proofreading marks and put in endless commas. Ted has made some alterations, which I’ve limited. He would rewrite a poem to eternity and stop the presses. I don’t mind retyping constantly, but we realize we must be much more strict in checking the typed Mss. we send. You need to review us on punctuation rules and Ms. correcting. You must remember all this from doing Daddy’s book, and we need you as a third, impartial proofreader. What fun it should be, though. I don’t count it as work at all; we’ll always be having something to proofread, I hope….
We heard dear, shrewd, funny, lovable Robert Frost read yesterday afternoon to a packed enthusiastic hall. He’s getting an honorary degree from Cambridge this spring. Ted loved him, and I feel the two of them have much in common. Well, I must gossip no longer but STUDY. I take exams at night in my dreams, alas, as well as next week. I’ll do my best, but as Ted says, I have an education and the marks can’t alter that.
We both send much love to you and Warren. In 32 days we’ll be with you.
x x x Sivvy
WEDNESDAY A.M.
MAY 29, 1957
Dearest Mother,
I am taking time early this sunny morning to limber up my stiff fingers in preparation for my Tragedy exam this afternoon and write you so you will know I’m still extant. Just. I have honestly never undergone such physical torture as writing furiously from 6 to 7 hours a day (for the last two days) with my unpracticed pen-hand. Every night I come home and lie in a hot tub, massaging it back to action. Ted says I’m a victim of evolution and have adapted to the higher stage of typing and am at a disadvantage when forced to compete on a lower stage of handwriting!
My exams Monday (another American girl and I went with knees shaking) were quite pleasant. French translation and notes, fair and simple, and the afternoon Essay topics varied and interesting—a marked change from papers of other years.
I took “Stylization,” and, I think, wrote a very clever essay ostensibly in praise of style in all its forms as a religious devotee of style, defining it as that order, line, form, and rhythm in everything from the sonnet to the whalebone corset which renders the unruly natural world into becoming bearable. I made up a fable of God as the Supreme Stylizer and the Fall, and an allegory of the history of man—a bloody pageant in search of the Ultimate Style of thought, ritual, etc., bringing in Yeats and Eliot, etc…. Anyway, I was elated Monday, but the exams yesterday were worse than anything I had imagined. Dating, that black terror of Americans who have no sense of the history of language, was compulsory, and it took half an hour simply to read the exam through….
… for D. H. Lawrence I had read most of the novels and memorized passages on moral theory only to be forbidden to speak of his novels and requested to analyze his life development (a favorite word) from either his short stories or nonfiction and verse. I was so furious at this that I got back by writing on his fable, “The Man Who Died‚” about Jesus, under the question on fable and moral … All the questions bore no reference to the moral work of the writers, but were large, general relations to politics, law, the “thought of the century‚” etc. A mean, vague, fly-catching mind behind it all. As one person said to me on going out: “It took me an hour to find how I could fit what I knew into the questions.” Well, I wrote on Hobbes, Lawrence, Blake and Plato with references to my reading, which has certainly been wider than any of the other people’s. It’s disgusting to think that two years of work and excellent, articulate, thoughtful papers should be judged on the basis of these exams and nothing else. I have been so wound up by the enormity of disgorging such amounts of knowledge morning and afternoon that I am just going to spend my time on the moors (after the colossal job of packing this weekend), lying in the sun, hiking and unwinding. I’ll deserve it! …
… I … got a note from the Yale Press, saying my book had been chosen among the finalists for the publication prize, but Auden wouldn’t have judged them [it] till some time in early summer. My heart sank as I remember his judgments on my early Smith poems [Auden called them facile], but I do hope my book, “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber,” shows growth and would give anything to have it win; Auden would have to write a foreword to it then….
x x x Sivvy
P.S. Wednesday, 6 p.m. Tragedy exam all over; very stimulating and fair to make up for yesterday’s two horrors. Only one to go Friday a.m.—blessed Chaucer and a whole day (!) to study for it. Luck and love to Warren.
x x x Siv.
HEBDEN BRIDGE
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
SATURDAY NOON
JUNE 8, 1957
Dearest Mother,
How lovely to get your letter here at what I feel is the beginning of my new life. I am sitting comfortably ensconced in one of the great armchairs in the little living room with big picture windows overlooking a rainy landscape of green moortops and fields of cows; toasting my toes in front of the coal fire, browsing in James’ short stories while Ted reads Chaucer nearby and his older sister, Olwyn, recovers by sleeping late from her trip up from Paris yesterday for a 10-day vacation. As for me, I am just beginning to feel reborn.
Sylvia in Yorkshire, 1956
… We had not a moment of respite, and I felt as if a brand had been stamped on my head after exams … which prevented me from absorbing anything, but only pessimistically rewriting the exams in my mind. A very nasty young don took this opportune moment for making a devastating and absolutely destructive attack on one of my poems by showing how “hollow” it was compared to—guess who?—John Donne! Very typical of Cambridge criticism (all the other little “creative” writers were similarly dismissed, but I was singled out for particularly vicious abuse) and this coming at a time of nonwriting was especially trying.
Instead of bothering to stay around for the plethora of teas, dinners and sherries of the literary magazines and dons, we left the first day I could do so legally. I never parted from a house with more joy and feeling of good riddance … packing our things and knowing that we wouldn’t see them again for a month but could go free to the moors….
We walk for miles and meet not a soul—just larks and swallows and green, green hills and valleys. I never would have sensed the complete rest and freedom from “preparing a fac
e to meet a face” that one must around Cambridge. Ted’s mother has fixed up our room, and we read in bed and lounge about, and by the time we come home, we should be rested and raring to write and work and be happy to see people at home. Every step now is an advance. This has been in many ways the hardest drudging year of our lives. I can scarcely believe we’ve been married a year, come June 16. We counted days till now all through the long, dingy winter, and America looks like the Promised Land. Both of us are delighted to leave the mean, mealy-mouthed literary world of England. The only person I shall miss is my dear moralist supervisor, Doris Krook, who is as close to a genius saint as I’ve ever met….
Only seventeen days [to their sailing date]! How incredible and wonderful it seems. We’ll call you from NYC right away.
x x x Sivvy
MONDAY MORNING
JUNE 17, 1957
Dearest Mother,
Well, your daughter has been married a year and a day, as the fairy stories say, and hopes to be married a hundred more. I can’t actually remember what it was like not being married to Ted; but, as our horoscopes read, when Leo and Scorpio marry, they feel they’ve known each other forever in a former life.
We took yesterday off from relatives and spent it together on a shady hillside overlooking all the moors, reminiscing about our wedding day and the tough times past and good times to come. I woke to see Ted lugging into the room a huge vase of pink roses. We packed chicken and steak and books and set off.
The weather up here this past week has been exquisite; it is the one place in the world where I don’t miss the sea. The air is like clear sea water, thirst-quenching and cool, and the view of spaces, unlike anything I’ve seen in my life—you would love it; there are magnificent walks to take….
Ted’s book proofs from Harper’s, which we corrected up here, were elegant, so much more professional than Faber’s, and their rearranged order of the poems (which Faber is not following), infinitely better. I am thrilled that the book is dedicated to me! My first dedication! I am so proud of the poems; each time I read them I get shivers….
I just got my first term syllabus for my English 11 course this morning—fascinating. I can’t wait to prove myself teaching. I am ashamed I haven’t read half the novels on the list myself, but I’ll get the ones we don’t have at home and take them to the Cape this summer so that I’ll have read them all and naturally pick the ones I am best in—a marvellous choice is given us.
… I want to get so well on in my novel that I can rewrite it during the academic [year] and have it ready for publication in the spring. I think it will be called “Falcon Yard.” After many trials and errors in titles, this came to me and Ted at the same minute. It is the name of the yard where we met and thus the central episode of the book.
There is a good chance Ted may get a teaching job at Amherst the second year in America, and if I am only asked back to Smith, it would be perfect. Then we would both apply for fellowships to write for a year in Italy. Me, I hope, on my second novel by that time. By that time, I shall be 27 with enough books and money behind me to start having our projected three or four children. It is very important for us to have them later in life, in the late 20’s, because both of us are slow, late maturers and must get our writing personae established well before our personalities are challenged by new arrivals. Doesn’t it all sound heavenly and exciting? Work, work, that is the secret, with someone you love more than anything….
… We loved your anniversary card, which arrived Saturday. Had a lovely tea out here with Ted’s relatives and his amazing Dickensian-Falstaffian uncle (my favorite relative) who … gave us £50, which is a big help.
… See you in a week!
x x x Sivvy
* From the time Sylvia was a very little girl, she catered to the male of any age so as to bolster his sense of superiority. I recall her, when she was four years old, watching a boy of eleven demonstrating his prowess on a trapeze for her, clapping her hands, crying, “Juny [Junior], you are wonderful!”
In her diary, written when she was a ninth-grader, she described coming in second in the Junior High School spelling contest—a boy came in first. “I am so glad Don won,” she wrote. “It is always nice to have a boy be first. And I am second-best speller in the whole Junior High!”
She did not pretend the male was superior; she sought out those who were, and her confidence in her husband’s genius was unshakable.
PART FIVE
July 1957–October 28, 1959
Sylvia sailing into New York harbor, June 1957
Sylvia and Ted arrived in Wellesley the last week in June 1957, and were given a catered reception held in a large tent in the rear of our small house, attended by more than seventy people. Sylvia was radiant as she proudly introduced her poet husband.
A few days later her brother drove them to the Cape (their two bicycles on top of the car), to a small cottage in Eastham. Here Sylvia prepared her work for the fall semester at Smith College.
In Northampton the two found themselves again in cramped quarters in an attic apartment near the college. It was another rugged beginning. Sylvia, frustrated because teaching left her no time for writing, feared her talent would become hopelessly rusty. However, Ted’s appointment in January as instructor of English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts enabled them to chart a new and daring plan for their writing future. By keeping themselves on a strict budget, they were able to save enough to give up teaching the following June and rent a two-room apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston, planning to devote the remainder of 1958 and 1959 to writing. This decision had been a very difficult one for Sylvia, for she felt deeply indebted to such good friends as Mary Ellen Chase, Alfred Young Fisher, and Alfred Kazin, who had recommended her highly for both the Fulbright grant and the teaching post at Smith.
In Boston Sylvia and Ted set up a program of daily study and writing. In addition, Sylvia worked part-time at the Massachusetts General Hospital, writing up case histories, and audited Robert Lowell’s course in poetry at Boston University. There are no letters home during this period; we were close enough to visit often, and used the telephone instead of the mails.
By spring 1959 both writers had published a number of poems and Ted was awarded a Guggenheim grant. They now planned to have a child, whom Ted wished to be English-born. Sylvia concurred in this decision; however, before leaving the United States, she wanted them both to see the country from coast to coast. So, in the summer of 1959, they borrowed my car for a cross-country camping tour. In California they would meet my husband’s sister, Frieda.
On their return East they accepted an invitation to spend two months at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, a writers’ colony. There they wrote daily, and many of Sylvia’s poems produced in this period appeared in 1960 in her first book of poetry, The Colossus.
Before Thanksgiving, Sylvia and Ted returned to Wellesley, and in mid-December they embarked for England.
EASTHAM, MASS.
JULY 18 [?], 1957
Dearest Mother,
I have just finished the dishes and am sitting down to write the last few of my thank-you notes before turning to Virginia Woolf’s next novel. I miss hearing from you, except for that brief pink note, and hope you will write us little things, gossip and all. Now that I am home and you are so near, I miss you more than I did in England, where I stoically knew you and Warren were far beyond easy commuting distance. We look forward to seeing you here a week from tomorrow. Do let us know roughly what time….
The weather here has been beautiful. Ted and I are just getting into a routine, and the beginning writing is, as usual, awkward and painful. We will never get in this rusty state again, for writing is the prime condition of both our lives and our happiness. If that goes well, the sky can fall in. It is heavenly to write here: quiet, with no distractions or social duties. We try to get four hours of writing done by noon, bike to Nauset Light Beach for the afternoon of swimming and running, and read books in the ev
ening. I shall only have to go shopping once a week, which is fine….
I am a bit grumpy about not hearing [about] that poetry manuscript. By the time you get this, it will probably have come back and you will have sent it down here. It would actually be a relief to stop wavering between hope and despair and learn its fate definitely. Do send it right on if it comes; and call up, of course, if it should be accepted …
Both of us are getting deeply rested at last and losing the exhausting Cambridge scars. You could have done nothing more wonderful than giving us these seven weeks….
Much love,
Sylvia
SUNDAY EVENING
JULY 21, 1957
Dearest Mother and Warren,
It was lovely getting the long letter yesterday. I am feeling very happy and complete now, because today, at last, at last, I began making progress writing a story I’m really deeply fascinated by, with “real” characters, a good problem-plot and deft description. After bumbling about on the first five pages of it Friday, I really got back most of my old fluency and have much richer thoughts and experience to work with. My mind (my creative mind) had been completely crammed by hour by hour exam-reading and endless practical details and concerns for the last six months. And within a week, I am in the middle of a story, with two more acting themselves out in my head, and knowing that the more I write, the better, much better, I’ll be. So my dull gloom and rusty fingers and head are all gone, and all the rest of life—meals, beach, reading—becomes utter delight.
Ted has some more wonderful news: good fortune really draws more good fortune like a magnet. Imagine, the slick, austere New Yorker has just accepted one of his poems, “The Thought Fox,” for publication in early September!!! We heard via the Harper grapevine … that they’d shown The New Yorker his poems and we should be hearing from them. Ironically enough, a year ago, we sent the same poem to The New Yorker and it was rejected. What reputation does! In the same mail he got the proofs of two poems and simultaneous acceptance from the Spectator, a witty London weekly. So we should have a steady income of small checks for the next few months—15 of his poems are scheduled to come out in August and September, no less! He is writing on some Yorkshire tales now and has done a lovely bullfrog poem and is looking tan, wonderfully rested, and enjoying my meals.