All we need do now is hang the last of our Baskins [the artist Leonard Baskin had been a good friend at Smith] … I’m very glad Ted attracts artist admirers, a much nicer crew than writers.
As I say, Ted’s been getting all sorts of requests. One just came from a boys’ school in Canterbury for a reading (with fee and accommodation) next fall. I hope to go along with the Pooker to see that lovely town. Of course, his animal poems are naturals for reading to young people. Ted wrote out a 10-page single-space sheaf of notes explaining his poems for Mrs. Prouty, which I’ve typed up and sent off. She is so willing to try them out, we wanted to give her all the help necessary.
You will probably get a letter from Ted’s mother about her visit. I could see the dear woman was trying to notice everything, what I wore and all, to tell you. The baby was very good on the whole….
Did I tell you we’ve seen the black-and-white line drawings for his [Ted’s] children’s book? [Meet My Folks]? Very fine and witty, for college people as well as children, I feel. We’ll get reams of copies and have fun giving them to the Aldriches and all our other friends: a real gift book. I can’t wait to see the book itself. Ted got a very heartening notice from Faber in the mail today: his book is selling so steadily and well (for poetry) that they are doing a second printing of it! So soon! We are delighted.
The marvelous box of baby things arrived this morning. They are darling. I held them up in front of her and she gooed at them. I think you are dressing her for your arrival next summer … You have no idea how much it means to me to dress her in partly American clothes …
Love from us all,
Sivvy
JUNE 24, 1960
Dear Mother,
… Last night Ted and I went to a cocktail party at Faber & Faber, given for W. H. Auden. I drank champagne with the appreciation of a housewife on an evening off from the smell of sour milk and diapers. During the course of the party, Charles Monteith, one of the Faber board, beckoned me out into the hall. There Ted stood, flanked by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNiece on the one hand and Stephen Spender on the other, having his photograph taken. “Three generations of Faber poets there,” Charles observed. “Wonderful!” Of course, I was immensely proud. Ted looked very at home among the great.
Then we went to the Institute of Contemporary Arts and read our poems to an audience of about 25–30 young people with another poet (or, rather, non-poet; very dull).
… We love hearing about the progress of Sappho’s babies; they seem to be having about the same care as our own.
… After a midnight curfew like last night, getting up at 6 a.m. to feed Frieda (yes, we call her that now and it seems to suit her; we did really intend to name her after Aunt Frieda; she can take Rebecca if she goes through a romantic stage), I am exhausted by noon. I have kept up a schedule this week of going over to the study in the mornings, Ted giving Frieda her morning cereal, which holds her till I come back.
I am at the depressing, painful stage of trying to start writing after a long spell of silence, but the mornings at the study are very peaceful to my soul, and I am infinitely lucky we can work things out so I get a solid hunk of time off, or, rather, time on, a day. Ted goes in the afternoons. He has written three or four very good poems toward a third book. Now he is out at a rare book dealer’s who is going to sell the manuscripts of his two books to the University of Indiana, we hope, for a few hundred dollars. Of course, they’ll be worth more later, but he’ll have other manuscripts then, and we can do with the money now, skimping along as we are on the end of the Guggenheim, which ended officially May 31.
Glad you liked the New Yorker poem. I should have another about women in a Spanish fishing village coming out this summer. Now I need to write some more I can sell to them. Ted is a marvel of understanding—strongly behind my having 3–4 hours of writing and study time a day. And he is wonderful with the baby, who dotes on him.
Well, I shall sign off for now with love to you, Warren, Sappho and progeny.
Your own,
Sivvy
JUNE 30, 1960
Dear Mother,
… Something odd happened to me today which both elated and depressed me. I was walking the baby about the neighborhood after her injection; the air too cold and windy to go far, and half-dreamily let my feet carry me down a road I’d never been down before. I came up another street I seldom if ever use a block away and saw a house being painted and papered with a FREEHOLD FOR SALE sign. Now “Freehold” houses (outright yours after buying) are rare in London—most have 99-year leases from an agency which keeps ownership … In our area, really quite slummy, there is great opportunity to get a house for less than it will be in even a few years, as it is just beginning to be fancied up.
I was so excited about this house, 41 Fitzroy Road, the street where Yeats lived, and one end of it showing the green of Primrose Hill, that I ran home with the carriage and called Ted up at his study. He came to have a look at it. I have been thinking ahead a good deal, and this house had just the right number of rooms, built on the narrow plan of the houses here, at the end of a row joined together (very good, quiet on one side), and instead of backing onto another row, overlooking a charming Mews in back, only one floor high, so light floods in.
… Well, of course I had visions of a study for Ted in the attic there, a study for me, a bedroom for us, a nursery for the baby, and a room for guests (you) now and the next baby (babies). Plus the dear garden to hang laundry in and put playpens in (it’s a walled garden). Such a house, behind the posh Regent’s Park Road, yet part of an area not done-up as yet, on a corner, overlooking such a marvelous prospect, is just the Thing. I feel after our 3-year lease here (we could easily sublet this place), I simply don’t want to move into rented rooms again. And Ted needs a study, and the baby will need a room. … This place is priced at 9,250 pounds (multiply by $2.80 for dollars).
… Ted, of course, is much more hesitant than I to commit himself. I just don’t want to touch that $5,000 in our bank [the money they’d earned from their writing] and am loath to jeopardize Ted’s writing, which he has just got going. One of us will probably have to take a job this fall in any case as we are stretching the Guggenheim out till September 1. Well, I am so tempted to somehow get hold of this place. London is the one place in Europe we could both easily get work and live cheaply in. I am thinking of work myself, if Ted would just feed the baby her noon meal, so he could write (I’ll spill this over onto a second letter …) and earn us something. Have you, by the way, any ideas or suggestions. I do so miss somebody who has had experience in these matters to talk it all over with.
x x x Sivvy
Here’s the second installment of my air letter and the note asking to withdraw $1,000 from our Wellesley savings … Anyhow, somebody else will probably snap the house up. But we will have to think seriously of committing ourselves to a house in a year or two. To complicate matters, Ted (and this is a secret; don’t let him or anyone know I’ve mentioned this) has signified a real desire to take a degree in zoology here in London, an external course at the University. Naturally, this would be very difficult in any circumstances, especially if we were still bleeding rent to landlords. But I do so wish I could see a way clear for him to do it. It would be a job he could give his heart to and not the fancy literary white-collar work or English teaching which would make him unhappy. Refer to this as The Plan if you write me about it …
Well, tell me what you think about all my ramblings …
Love,
Sivvy
P.S. Ted’s been offered 160 pounds (about $450) for his manuscripts….
JULY 9, 1960
Dear Mother,
It was good to get your letter with the nice reactions about Frieda’s pictures. I hope the clipping I sent you of Ted enshrined between The Great amuses you, too. He heard definitely this week that Indiana University is buying the manuscripts of his first two books, which is good. Also, even better news came this week: the BBC Third Progra
mme has accepted his second verse play, “The House of Aries,” for production this coming fall. Ted wrote the play in the three months after Frieda arrived—amazing when you consider the confusion and weariness of those early days. It is a marvelously funny, moving and serious play, full of superb speakable poetry, about a revolution overtaking a sleepy little village. The scene is in the bedridden Mayor’s house. It is relatively short, about 70 typewritten double-spaced pages, and, with a little cutting, should take about an hour on the radio. We are really thrilled by this early commercial acceptance of his dramatic verse. He has scrapped the first play, “The House of Taurus,” which really was only a rough, rather unpoetic draft, or redraft, of a theme from the Bacchae with an antiquated social message.
Interestingly enough, your letter about your dream of Ted’s satire on Khrushchev arrived just before the BBC acceptance and one of the main characters in this play is the revolutionary Captain, a profoundly analyzed military figure. So you are prophetic! I hope his next play may see the stage …
The BBC has also asked to see some poems of mine for a program of New Poetry, which is kind of them, and I hope they take something … The Third Programme is a real blessing, and they pay wonderfully, about $3 a minute for poetry.
… Leo Goodman, Ann Davidow’s genius, drove us to see Roots, the middle part of a working-class trilogy by one of the very new young British playwrights. Very realistic, down to the eating of ice cream and pouring potato water out of the potatoes. I kept thinking how much more amusing a play Ted could have done.
Eliot has offered to read and discuss any plays in verse Ted does, which is highly kind of him. My one aim is to keep Ted writing full-time. When I think how easily his uncle could help him until he gets making money, I see red …
x x x Sivvy
AUGUST 16, 1960
Dear Mother,
I have a feeling I haven’t written for ages, so probably haven’t. Ted is off for the afternoon with his friend, Danny Huws, to look for some sturdy wooden chairs for us in the antique and junk dealers in Portobello Road, and Frieda is woo-wooing in bed after her lunch feed, preparatory to dropping off for her afternoon nap … I have been getting little surprises ready for Ted’s birthday tomorrow—a Fortnum and Mason chicken pie, expensive, but which he loves, a bottle of white wine, a photograph album in which I’ve pasted all our good pictures and written notes under them to encourage us to take more, a jar of maple syrup, and an original (!) painting in bright colors and ink of a sort of Aztec king done by the owner of our local art gallery, and I feel marked down for me by his wife out of kindness—this last being the main item. If it’s nice I hope to go on a picnic with him and Frieda in Hampstead Heath or just Primrose Hill …
Friday I think we’ll pack off to Yorkshire. Ted is a bit homesick for the moors, and I think both of us would benefit with a change. With luck and an express train, the trip should only take half a day. We’ll come down again next Wednesday, in time for Frieda’s vaccination Thursday….
… We had lunch with one of the editors of the Texas Quarterly last Saturday at his rented rooms, with several other people. He is a professor and a charming, odd man. In addition to taking $100 worth of poems from the two of us, he is buying one of Ted’s stories … for $100 also. He asked us to bring Frieda, and she was very good, sleeping the whole time. That evening a friend of Ted’s sister, a young Hungarian poet and playwright, took us to dinner at a good Hungarian restaurant. I went off on my own last night to save the price of a babysitter and saw Laurence Olivier in the movie of The Entertainer. An amazing part for him, very much the un-hero.
Warren was so good to write us on the day of the publication of Ted’s book. Odd how he describes his dates by height! I have a kind of running graph in my mind of their heights and nothing else…. As you were reading your World War II book about Auschwitz, I was finishing Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli: absolutely fascinating and terrifying. One senses the awful stupidity of generals (all these were safe on islands and boats and utterly out of communication with the soldiers) and the criminal negligence of politicians in this greatest fiasco of the first World War. Ted’s father fought at Gallipoli, and a diary in his breast pocket stopped a bullet, so I felt incalculably lucky as I read of the mammoth, pointless slaughters that he survived and fathered the one husband I could imagine.
I am trying to have a rigid housework schedule—laundry and market Monday, iron Tuesday, etc., to counteract the otherwise helter-skelter days. When one only has one’s own inclination to consult, it is too easy to procrastinate. I am managing a fair amount of time for reading—just finished translating a play by Sartre, Le Diable et Le Bon Dieu—but have had little energy for writing in anything but my diary and a few light poems, two of which I think The New Yorker will take. My manuscript of poems should come back to you from the Yale contest, which I didn’t win this year; the editor likes witty, light verse and I guess mine’s too serious for him. Keep the manuscript and use it for scrap. I do feel sorry no publisher in America seems to want my book, for I am sure it is better than most first books, but I am glad it will come out here….
Love to all,
Sivvy
HEBDEN BRIDGE
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
AUGUST 27, 1960
Dear Mother,
Ted and I have been up here in Yorkshire for a week now, and I am just beginning to feel that deep, peaceful energy that comes from having completely unwound and caught up on months of fatigue. We have been simply eating, sleeping, and taking long walks. I think you would love it up here—the unique combination of breathtaking scenery and invigorating air and no tourists.
Ted’s cousin Vicky drove us to Whitby, a British seaside resort, for a day and a night. We took the baby, who is a very good traveler. … There is something depressingly mucky about English sea resorts. Of course, the weather is hardly ever sheer fair, so most people are in woolen suits and coats and tinted plastic raincoats. The sand is muddy and dirty. The working class is also dirty, strewing candy papers, gum and cigarette wrappers.
My favorite beach in the world is Nauset, and my heart aches for it. I don’t know, but there is something clean about New England sand, no matter how crowded.
… Ted’s Uncle Walter, with his curious habits, had for some reason—probably secretly admiring Ted’s sticking to his chosen way of life—stuffed about $150 into his pocket one night we were out at the local pub, playing darts with him and Ted’s dad, so we did not feel the strain of a holiday eating into our strict monthly budget.
Ted’s mother has a lovely little garden up here—daisies, roses, poppies, brightly surviving in the lee of a black stone wall. I prefer this landscape and air to the sea. If only we had a house to ourselves … in a similar lonely spot, we could get an immense deal done. As Ted says, most people’s problem is lack of ideas, while his is that he has so many ideas and no really settled quiet place to write them. We’re going to ask the lady in the attic above us if he can work there while she’s at her job….
… I really hunger for a study of my own out of hearing of the nursery where I could be alone with my thoughts for a few hours a day. I really believe I could do some good stories if I had a stretch of time without distractions….
… Lots of love to you, Warren, and Sappho …
x x Sivvy
CHALCOT SQUARE
LONDON, ENGLAND
AUGUST 31, 1960
Dear Mother,
… Ted has asked the kindly bohemian Mrs. Morton, who works as French translator at the telephone exchange, if he can use her room upstairs to write in while she’s out. She was agreeable and he is up there now. We’ll leave her a bottle of sherry every now and then as a thanks token … He just has to pop down when I call for lunch. A lifesaver. He says it’s much more quiet and peaceful without all the distracting books and giddy hairdresser sublessees at the Merwins’. She leaves at 7:30 and is back at 5:30, so he has a good day.
I wish you could see the mail he gets! Italian
translators, asking the British Council to speak to him, American editors over here hoping to meet him, magazines and newspapers panting for his poems and stories. He has already sold his five or six new poems several times over. He wants to work on a 3-act play now. He read his speech from his BBC play wonderfully over the radio, and I can’t wait to hear it produced there this fall. There is a fantastic market for plays in London—all youngish authors.
All he needs is one really good, successful play, and we would have a good start. Our wish now is to get a car, a beach-wagony affair, tour Cornwall and Devon and buy a spreading country house with some land and settle down to write and raise a family. Once he has a successful play produced, we could do this; and then buy a Hampstead-London house overlooking the Heath if we ever got really wealthy. I’m sure we could do a great deal in the peace of the country—a London house is simply out of our reach now. We’d ideally like to buy outright, or as nearly so as possible, to cut rent and rates. Well, since being in London, we’ve made the equivalent of $1,250 in pounds, which is nice, not counting what we sent you in dollars, which we pretend doesn’t exist….
… I wish you’d spend half as much time in your afternoons playing with women’s magazine stories, with feeling. Get a plot, imagine it in several scenes, with a character changing through events and finding something out about life and resolving problems. I’ll edit anything you do for what it’s worth. I bet if you pretended this was the way you had to earn some money, you’d turn out two or three things in the year. Why don’t you try? … Start with the things you know, your friends’ stories, and pare them objectively to have a beginning, middle and end—not just to copy the long span of life. You could do it; and I bet once you started, you’d have fun. You might start with someone resembling yourself, only with young children … whose job is threatened and work it out via another character. Call it The Question Mark. What do you think? Make use of the old adage you taught me: “Get your hero/heroine up a tree; fling stones at him/her, then have him extricate himself.” People “identify” with people in trouble, people wrestling with problems! Get to it, mummy!