We are really unfolding and getting into our stride. I suppose a week is very little time to get adjusted in, after a year of slavery, to freedom writing, but it’s seemed an age to us, and now we’re happy as chipmunks, our cheeks chockful of ideas….
… Have read three Virginia Woolf novels this week and find them excellent stimulation for my own writing. Bless you a thousand times for making this possible for us—a perfect place for reestablishing our writing. Who knows, we may earn next summer here all by ourselves this summer if we work hard enough….
… I hope to get two stories off to the Saturday Evening Post by the time you come and begin on my novel after warming up.
… Do write more; we love to get your letters …
x x x Sivvy
AUGUST 6, 1957
Dear Mother,
… I am at last writing my first poem for about six months, a more ambitious topic: a short verse dialogue which is supposed to sound just like conversation but is written in strict 7-line stanzas, rhyming ababcbc. It frees me from my writer’s cramp and is at last a good subject—a dialogue over a Ouija board, which is both dramatic and philosophical.
I really think I would like to write a verse play, now. If I practice enough on getting color into speech, I can write in quite elaborate rhymed and alliterative forms without sounding like self-conscious poetry, but rather like conversation. So I am much happier. I mailed my baby-sitter (or, rather, my mother’s-helper) story to the Ladies’ Home Journal yesterday, along with a revised version of my laundromat story. Both are very light and frothy, as they say, with much funny dialogue, but the mother’s-helper story is richer in many ways than the earlier one. I am as yet most pleased, however, about the one I sent off to the Saturday Evening Post just before you came, which is the most dramatically tight story I’ve ever written, starting at the peak of a crisis in the morning, with vary tightly knit … flashbacks and four rich characters, even five, and a surprise and climax in the evening. I am really hoping to sell it somewhere as it is a central problem, yet not a trite situation….
… Will write more later. Love to you and Warrie.
x x x Sivvy
Sylvia and Ted at Eastham, Cape Cod, 1958
SEPTEMBER 23, 1957
Dearest Mother,
Got your nice long letter today. Much appreciated the advice about deep breaths [I had advised yoga breathing exercises] , etc. I ricochet between chills and fever but am working on a rather devil-may-care attitude which seems to be best for me, as I am so over conscientious. I will never be anything less than conscientious at least. My first class is on Wednesday at 3 p.m…. Thus, in effect, my 3 p.m. class will be a test for the next day’s two morning classes, and I can revise mistakes in between. I have three office hours “by appointment” and am supposed to see all my 65 students for conferences as often as possible, which I see now will take much of my time, but I want to be very conscientious about this, too….
This next week is full of meetings: oaths of allegiance, department and faculty meetings, buffet supper and president’s reception next Wednesday. How I long to be busy! This brooding and isolation is something I must avoid. As soon as I am busy, with a hundred things to do, read, forms to fill out, I function very happily and efficiently. I am sure that once I get into a daily routine, I’ll find that I don’t have to spend all my time on class preparation and correcting papers, and it will be a relief to know we are discussing only two stories for tomorrow, say, instead of feeling, as I do now, the abstract simultaneous pressure of the term challenging me all at once. Ted is wonderful: so understanding, and cooks me breakfast and cleans up the dishes….
The head of the Hampshire Bookshop, an ex-Smith woman, very nice, sent Ted two little bottles of American champagne on his publication day, last Wednesday, and Harper’s sent a telegram. We drank one bottle then by candlelight and will drink the other (about a glass each) when I’ve finished my first week of teaching on Saturday.
My first day of class is very routine. I’ll introduce myself, as you say, talk about the course and assign the term’s books and the week’s assignments and ask them to write out a questionnaire I’ll make up—about themselves, their interests, their reading, so I’ll have a profile of each one to help me get to know them and to aid in filling out my own information. I’m free to tell them (and encouraged) to come around to my office just to “get acquainted,” so will give my best to this, seat them alphabetically, etc. My second class day I’ll begin really teaching—the most difficult book of the course—two chapters from William James. The classes are not lectures, but discussions, so I can only prepare the main points to cover and perhaps a little background material and must learn what I can draw from them. I also want to learn how to explain grammatical errors. I have an editorial eye and know something’s wrong when I see it, but must learn the rules….
Must run to my office now, where I plan to read all afternoon. Do call Wednesday evening at supper if you can get over to the Aldriches [our good neighbors, who had unlimited phone service and invited me to do this once a week. Sylvia, however, kept me on the line so long, it was an abuse of generosity, and I had to discontinue the practice after a while]. After six, I plan to spend the evenings at home. We are scheduled to go to NYC Sunday, October 20, for a reception and a half hour’s reading for Ted. Much love. Bless me on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!
Your own Sivvy
UNDATED; NOVEMBER 1957
Dearest Mother,
… I wish we could get to know more people outside the faculty and gradually develop an outside life. It is a rest to be away from my job, which I wasn’t at all until yesterday afternoon. I find it little relaxation to have evenings with the people in the department—the specter of my questions hovers always in the background, and they don’t want to talk shop any more than I do. But, of course, I can’t be really frank with them or say how I begrudge not sitting and working at my real trade, writing, which would certainly improve rapidly if I gave it the nervous energy I squander on my classes …
Ted and I looked so longingly at the farms on the hilltops here. We would like a spreading house, with a couple of apple trees, fields, a cow, and a vegetable garden, because we can’t stand city living and don’t enjoy suburbs where neighbors’ children and radios impinge on the air. We are really country people, and there must be a sunny hilltop place we could buy sometime in the next ten years. I like the hills in Hadley and Easthampton, on the other side of the river, very much.
I hope, as soon as my job ends this year, to apprentice myself to writing in earnest. Part-time dallying never got a beginner anywhere, and now I don’t even have time for that and feel my talent rusting, and it is very painful to me.
We love this apartment and will probably stay here all summer no matter what we are doing next year.
Much love,
Sivvy
NOVEMBER 5, 1957
Dearest Warren,
I have been very wicked not to write sooner, and we loved your letters. But I’ve been in a black mood and haven’t felt like writing anybody, because I haven’t had anything particularly cheerful to share.
I’ve just now finished correcting a set of 66 papers on two Hawthorne stories I assigned and am faced with cramming for my preparation for this week’s classes, which begin for me tomorrow. This coming weekend will be the first where I haven’t had a set of papers or exams to exhaust me and put me off preparing anything much for class, so I hope I can face my problems squarely and get some idea of what the hell I’m teaching. I keep feeling I could make up some good stuff out of my head to teach them about symbolism or style, but have so little time as yet, and so am always deathly nervous. I must make up little brief 5-minute lectures on topics, for I am a hopeless extempore speaker. If I only knew my “subject” or was an expert, but I am struggling enough to review mere grammar and term paper forms, which bore me, alas. This week, too, I’m being “visited” by other professors, which is enough to throw me into
a cold twitch. I wish I were more conceited, it would be a big help.
Ted’s reviews are really amusing: every reviewer praises him in some way, although one or two British ones are reluctant. They are really grotesque: each seizes one or two or three poems and raves about them, passes off one or two others, but each raves about different poems. Some say he is all music but has nothing to say (a very stupid review); some say he is all profundity but has slack lines of rhythm. They are all rather batty.
… As you may imagine, I feel very clairvoyant. I saw all this would happen; I also saw no critic would have my omniscient appreciation, but that all would rave about the poem or poems that fitted their view: war poems, or lyric poems, or rhymed poems, or nature poems. Edwin Muir in the New Statesman & The Nation said Ted’s Jaguar poem is better than Rilke’s panther poem! How’s that! Did we tell you Ted has got two new poems accepted in the Sewanee Review?
I sometimes wonder if I can live out the grim looming aspect of this year without despairing. I miss not cooking and keeping up the house—Ted is an angel and makes my breakfast and lunch, but I only get a chance to make a dessert on the Saturday afternoon after classes when I have one breath of freedom. I envision myself as writing in the morning and reading widely and being a writing-wife. I am simply not a career woman, and the sacrifice of energy and lifeblood I’m making for this job is all out of proportion to the good I’m doing in it. My ideal of being a good teacher, writing a book on the side, and being an entertaining homemaker, cook and wife is rapidly evaporating. I want to write first, and being kept apart from writing, from giving myself a chance to really devote myself to developing this “spectacular promise” that the literary editors write me about when they reject my stories, is really very hard.
Also, I don’t like meeting only students and teachers. That is the life here, and it is, in a way, airless. Ted and I have been hashing this over and over. We need the stimulation of people, people from various jobs and backgrounds, for writing material. And I can’t write about academics. We cast about for a place to live that wasn’t New York and thought next year of living in Boston. Ted would get a job, not anything to do with a university, and I would write in the mornings and work part-time at odd jobs which would get me into meeting queer people and give me time to sketch and really work at writing. I would like to be anonymous for a while, not the returned and inadequate heroine of the Smith campus. There is nothing worse than going back to a place where you were a success and being miserable. But I may feel better when I get more rested. At least, I am able to sleep now and eat heartily on weekends. But this life is not the life for a writer. After I have written 20 stories and a book or two of poems, I might be able to keep up writing with work or a family, but I am needing to apprentice myself to my real trade, which I hope to do next year.
I’m really wicked to run on about my problems like this, but it helps somehow to get them talked out. Every time you make a choice you have to sacrifice something, and I am sacrificing my energy, writing and versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches. If I knew how to teach a short story, or a novel, or a poem I’d at least have that joy. But I’m making it up as I go along, through trial and error, mostly error. And our classes are going to be visited by professors off and on from now on, so I shall probably be dismissed with a sigh of relief at the end of the year.
… It’s easier for the men, I think, because the Smith girls respect them more, and the older women have experience and a kind of authority and expertness which carries them through. It’s Ted who really saves me. He is sorry I’m so enmeshed in this and wants me to write starting this June: being writers, not established, is difficult because you don’t just want to take routine jobs with no future for money, but professional jobs take too much training and sacrifice to make writing possible….
How I long to write on my own again! When I’m describing Henry James’ use of metaphor to make emotional states vivid and concrete, I’m dying to be making up my own metaphors. When I hear a professor saying: “Yes, the wood is shady, but it’s a green shade—connotations of sickness, death, etc.,” I feel like throwing up my books and writing my own bad poems and bad stories and living outside the neat, gray secondary air of the university. I don’t like talking about D. H. Lawrence and about critics’ views of him. I like reading him selfishly for an influence on my own life and my own writing.
Ted is working on a children’s book and some poems, but I feel he’ll do better when I’m through this and happy again. I can be a good writer and an intelligent wife without being a good teacher. But the ironic thing about teaching like this is that I don’t have time to be intelligent in a fluid, versatile way. I’m too nose-to-the-grindstone. The girls know I’m new at teaching and young and probably much more, and they take advantage of it, which they wouldn’t if I were really good. Eh bien.
Do write me soon. I love to hear from you. So does Ted. Forgive this rather drear letter. Unlike mother, I am a writer, not a teacher, and must work at my trade in order to be worthy of the name.
x x x Sivvy
NOVEMBER 28, 1957
Dear Warren,
… I have heard unofficially that I will probably be asked back for next year and would have “good chances of promotion,” but have chosen to get out while the getting’s good. I see too well the security and prestige of academic life, but it is Death to writing. Vacations, as I’m finding out, are an illusion, and you must spend summers preparing new courses, etc. Writing is obviously my Vocation, which I am finding out the hard way, but Ted and I are fermenting good plans for this June 1, hoping to rent a little apartment on the slummy side of Beacon Hill, which we love, and work, me part time and Ted full time, at unresponsible, unhomeworked jobs (for money, bread and experience with unacademic people) and write for a solid year, then try for a grant to Italy on the basis of a year’s manuscripts. Such vision keeps me going. Had a fine time recording at Steven Fassett’s studios on Beacon Hill where all the poets record for Harvard …
I love that part of town and can’t wait to find a place there, become unacademic, anonymous, and write….
Grampy was dear and loaned Ted a watch till Christmas as Ted’s trying to set up a radio station for a couple of hours in Amherst for the WHMP station manager: just a gamble at a part-time job which might make him feel better. He needs to see people and work some, as I do, but Northampton isn’t a good place at all for the kind of queer, offbeat, interesting job he’d like, so we tried this, instead of selling in shoestores. If he can get sponsors, he will get a wage. Ted has, by the way, fractured his fifth metatarsal in his right foot to complicate matters—he did it by jumping out of an armchair while his foot was asleep!
… I want to finish my poetry book this summer, write a series of short stories and begin a novel, without anything such as a teaching job and preparation hanging over my head; so mother will teach me to use a dictating machine and I’ll hire out at part-time jobs to give my life variety and contact with people, which every writer, or most, need as a balance to complete solitude at the typewriter.
Mother, Ted, and I had a really hysterical evening and dinner with Mrs. Prouty last night. She’s obsessed with Ted, as she was with you, and really plays up to him, calling him handsome, trying to get him on TV, etc. She has an “ant farm,” which she watches constantly, and it’s very strange and absorbing. Must close now.
Much love,
Sivvy
DECEMBER 8, 1957
Dearest Mother,
This letter should by now greet you at Dotty’s, and how happy I am to know you’ll be out of the hospital [another operation] today and on the road to recovery. It was wonderful getting your cheery letter and hearing about your rapid improvement. Our family must really be pretty tough and resilient. You’ve been through so much hospital treatment and are coming out better than ever! …
… somehow, I’ve felt more philosophic
al this last week in spite of my deep exhaustion. The year doesn’t look quite endless. I also got a rather grim satisfaction that those 700 pages of papers didn’t floor me … Too, I am taking things which would earlier have floored me—occasional sassiness, poor preparation for class by some girls, difficult office-hour conferences—more in my stride. I had a hard problem with a very nasty case of plagiarism in my last set of papers, so obvious as to be impossible as “a mistake,” and had to send the girl to Honor Board. She is a very shifty character and wavering between a D plus and C minus, not preparing for class discussions and, unfortunately, just the sort who’d do something like this. She claimed it was all a mistake, she just “didn’t know how it happened,” and I probably got much sicker over it than she did. But I sent her to Honor Board.
Although it is extremely painful for me not to write, knowing how even more painful it will be when I start to write in June, I’ve decided to make the best of a bad job and make them sorry to lose me. I have had several teachers say to me they’ve “heard” from students and visiting teachers to my classes that I’m a “brilliant teacher,” so in spite of my obvious faults, I can’t be bad. One thing, I’m hardly ever dull, and since it’s my first year, I think I’m doing about all I could ask of my ignorant self. I’m getting a little more realistic about it. If I can just get my preparation done a week ahead, instead of this last-minute rush, I’ll feel even better.