x x x Sivvy
TUESDAY MORNING
SEPTEMBER 13, 1960
Dear Mother,
… I have a poem about the baby in this month’s Atlantic and Ted has a wonderful review of his book by Stanley Kunitz in the book section of this month’s Harper’s….
… Tell us when you think you would be coming over here next summer and how long you could stay. We are cudgeling our brains to think of the best time to take our three months in Europe and probably will try this next March, April, and May. Then we would have some money left over, we hope, to live on the summer you came … Ted works five days a week in the lady’s living room upstairs, a very quiet place, but is dependent on her kindness and he needs a study, so do I, and a yard for the children to play in. Well, these are all hopeful projects….
Ted’s radio play is so queer and interesting that I’m dying to see this next one, which came to him in a dream.
We left the baby with a girl at Merwins’ and wangled a pass to the Picasso exhibit again (we had to go separately before) Sunday morning when it was only open to a few people with passes, not the 6,000-a-day, and had it all to ourselves. Met our friend and professor at Harvard, Jack Sweeney, who recorded us for the Lamont Library, and he is due any minute for a visit to see the baby. We’ll lunch with him tomorrow.
… How I wish you had a country place near here. I envy my neighbors who have English country grandmothers and are always exchanging visits. Ted and your beautiful granddaughter join in sending much love—
Sivvy
SEPTEMBER 23, 1960
Dear Mother,
Hello! …
… Last night Ted and I went to John Lehmann’s fashionable house overlooking a green crescent in Kensington for drinks (it happened to be champagne, we were lucky). He’s editor of the London magazine, where we both publish a good deal, and is very odd and nice. I met my young publisher there and Ted, the writer P. H. Newby on the BBC who had accepted his play. The little balcony was open and the evening pleasant. Ted’s play is being broadcast twice late this fall here, and his translation of 100 lines or so of the Odyssey, too, as part of a series done by about a dozen different people. He found a word for word literal translation and made poetry of it. He’s also been asked to be one of three editors of an annual anthology of poems that carries a fee of about $70, which is nice.
I have just enrolled today at the Berlitz School here for lessons in beginning Italian, as Ted, I think, would most like to go to Italy for his Maugham award, and I definitely want to be able to speak and read Italian to profit by this … If I get on well and like their methods, I might try classes in German or French … My first lesson is next week. I am also investigating the extension courses at London University, which I am too late to register for this year, but which I would like to get into next year….
x x Sivvy
WEDNESDAY
SEPTEMBER 28‚ 1960
Dear Mother,
… Do you know anyone whose radio can get the BBC? It would be so nice for you to hear it. In Yorkshire we sat round at tea with all the relatives, tuned in and heard Ted reading two of his poems, one of them a speech from the play, which was lovely. He is also grunting over an article for The Nation on the Arnold Wesker trilogy of plays which we enjoyed seeing here this summer. He was originally going to refuse to do the article, but I felt it was because he, out of his great modesty, felt he didn’t know enough about the American theatre of the 30’s and Clifford Odets’ plays (also, about Jews and Communists), so I very slowly persuaded him to take a day or two to read Odets at the British Museum and that his own instinctive reactions were better than most garbled criticism I had read. I also bought Penguin paperback editions of the two plays in print.
Usually I let his judgment be the final arbiter on such matters, but here I felt he’d be glad he’d done an article which is right up his alley. Wesker is just my age, and his play Roots, the middle of the trilogy, is about Norfolk farmers and full of good things. It’s coming to America this year, so see it if it comes to Boston. Although The Nation pays very little, both of us admire the magazine very much …
Ted is slaving on these bits now to clear the decks for his own play, “The Calm,” which sounds marvelously exciting, very fully realized. One success could buy us a house! It’s a gamble and takes faith, but Ted has every reason to feel he can do it. When Charles Monteith at Faber had lunch with Ted and Thorn Gunn last week, he said, “Tom Eliot is delighted with the drawings and poems in Meet My Folks”! I can’t wait to see the book; it is scheduled for Spring 1961, about in time for Frieda’s first birthday….
London is inexhaustible. Although I’d very much like to have a house in Cornwall, I would have to have some arrangement whereby we’d be in London half a year and there half a year … Oh, well. I am much more a city-dweller than Ted….
When I get really proficient in Italian (I’ll take another course after this one right up to the time we go abroad), I want to start conversational German and spend our next vacation in Austria—perhaps visiting that inn you spoke of. My ambition now is to get three European languages really well—a unique chance, living so close to Europe. I’ve always wanted to be able to speak and read several languages and with the reasonableness [in cost] of these Berlitz courses, I can.
Oh, I would LOVE a subscription to The New Yorker. Ironically, I dreamed of getting one last night before your letter came. Well, best love to you, Warren, and dear Sappho.
x x x Sivvy
SATURDAY MORNING
OCTOBER 8, 1960
Dearest Mother,
… Ted is going to buy a cheap radio this week. His story “The Rain Horse” is going to be broadcast over the BBC again next week and his translation of a section of the Odyssey in a series of twelve translations by various people, and, in November and December, his play, which I have just finished typing up in final revised form. So I don’t want to miss any of these. And the Third Programme has a lot I want to listen to—plays in French, too.
I have a new and exciting hobby. You will laugh…. I went downtown and bought three 2-yard lengths of material—one bright red Viyella (at $1.50 a yard), one bright blue linen, and one soft Wedgwood blue flannel with stylized white little flowers on it (both at about 50 cents a yard). I also bought a dress pattern and nightgown pattern (Simplicity). Yesterday I completely cut out and basted the little nightgown, in a one-year size. It is exquisite…. I pinned the little nightgown together to see what it would be like, and it’s a little fairytale thing…. My next purchase that I’ll save up for is a sewing machine! I don’t know when anything has given me as much pleasure as putting together the flannel nighty for Frieda—the pieces are so little, they are very quickly done. If I practice a lot now, I’ll probably be able to make most of her clothes when she goes to school. The London stores are full of marvellous fabrics …
Ted and I agreed that when we’re wealthy, we will buy a loom, a kiln, and a book press and go into handcrafts (where the materials are expensive) and teach our children these things. We feel they are the most satisfying things in the world to do. I am awfully proud of making clothes for little Frieda….
By the way, the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge [Massachusetts] writes that they are planning to “do” Ted’s play this month. We don’t know whether this means just to give it a reading or to produce it, and we have airmailed them the revised version. Could you—in the guise of an interested person only—call up or get a copy of their season’s program and find if it’s going to be produced and then go to it and report to us? We want a secret, incognito eye to see what havoc they wreak on it since we are not there to check … Love from us all; keep away from germs!
Sivvy
WEDNESDAY
OCTOBER 26, 1960
Dear Mother,
Well, I sent off a heavy packet of two books—one for you and one for Warren—by surface mail yesterday. I would have sent them by air, but the price, even book rate, was prohibitive as the books
are fat and weigh a good deal. I am touched that my publisher got them out in my birthday week after I told him how superstitious I was. I hope the two printing errors toward the end don’t upset you as much as they did me! I’ve marked the corrections in your books and am appalled that after several proofreadings I was guilty of letting them get through, but Ted has reassured me about them and you do, too. I am delighted with the color of the cover—the rich, green oblong, white jacket and black-and-white lettering—and the way the green cover inside matches with the gold letters. It is a nice fat book which takes up ¾ of an inch on the shelf, and I think they did a handsome job of it….
… I am scheduled to go to the British Broadcasting Company and record two of my new poems (post-book) which they finally accepted after rejecting two groups from my book. I am very pleased about this. One poem is a monologue from the point of view of a man about the flowers in the lady’s room upstairs (where he isn’t working any more—her visitors are something she wants to keep secret….) The other poem is about candles and reminiscences of grammy and grampy in Austria spoken while nursing Frieda by candlelight at 2 a.m. I’m very fond of it.
Last night Ted and I went to dinner at Stephen Spender’s house with an artist; the poet Louis MacNiece and one of his girl friends, the novelist, ageing, with violet-white hair, Rosamond Lehmann (one of the well-known Lehmann family—her brother John being editor of the London magazine and her sister Beatrix being an actress). Their conversation is fascinating—all about Virginia Woolf, what Hugh Gaitskell said to Stephen in Piccadilly that morning, why Wystan (W. H. Auden) likes this book or that, how Lloyd George broke Spender’s father’s heart, and such-like. Rosamond Lehmann’s childhood was spent among such house visitors as Browning, Schumann—or at least among memories of their visits—that whole old world surrounding them like a vision….
Ted’s income from the BBC this year has been as good as a salary—we’ve about $1,600 in the bank here from our English writing, and he has an exciting prospect of doing broadcasts for school children, which would go all over England with no paper correcting or the personal drag of actual classroom teaching … Love to you and Warrie from Ted, Frieda, and me.
Our names for our next three children, by the way, are Megan (for a girl), Nicholas, and Jacob. How do you like them?
x x x Sivvy
OCTOBER 28, 1960
Dear Mother,
I think this birthday has been the best of all. I woke yesterday morning to find myself lying surrounded by interesting knobbly brown parcels, a German coffee cake with a candle lit in the middle of it, and Frieda sitting at my side, supported by Ted, holding the morning’s mail and a bar of my favorite German chocolate. Ted really knocked himself out; I have a new badly needed pair of red plush slippers lined with white fuzzy wool, two pairs of plastic overshoes, one for heels, as Ted wanted me to have something easily carried about for this showery London weather, a Fortnum & Mason chicken pie (our standby for special occasions), a bottle of pink champagne, the Tolkien trilogy, Lord of the Rings (adult version and extension of our beloved Hobbit) … and three wonderful slabs of strange cheeses for us to test: a gooey ripe Brie, a superbly mouldy blue Stilton, and a fat, round Wensleydale in a cloth sack all its own. I loved the cards and letters from you and Warren. I consider the load of pajamas for Frieda my present from you—I’d so much rather get something for her….
… Tuesday night we are going to the annual Guinness Awards champagne party (the award Ted got while in America), which should be fun. Hope you get my book in good order. Tell me what you think of it. Lots of love to you and Warren,
Sivvy
NOVEMBER 6, 1960
Dear Mother,
I’m enclosing two of the latest shots of the Pooker, alias Bunzo Bun … She sings now, a little high voice and funny look….
I gather you are going to the reading of Ted’s play. Do let us know what you think of it … He is now working on the rewriting of the libretto of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for that Chinese composer. He is very encouraged about it and really mastering it now. I think we’ll go up to Yorkshire over the weekend, as he has been asked to be present at a literary luncheon in Leeds about northern writers which will be put on television with John Betjemann’s program. I hope he gets his face into the screen. Then he has a lecture at the University in Hull.
… Had a lovely dinner the other night with a young couple around the corner in Chalcot Crescent—where we’d love to live if only a house came up—quiet, pretty, with nice professional families—and neighbors of theirs, a lively older couple on the BBC. I am immensely fond of this neighborhood! Love to all.
x x x Sivvy
P.S. Got a Press ticket from Stephen Spender for the last day of the Lady Chatterley trials at the Old Bailey—very exciting—especially with the surprising verdict of “not guilty”! So Penguin Books can publish the unexpurgated edition—a heartening advance for D. H. Lawrence’s writings!
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1960
Dear Mother and Warren,
I feel I haven’t written you for ages, which is probably true. Frieda has been teething … and cries off and on all night—great miserable yowls impossible to ignore, and the one thing to comfort her is to nurse her … I got a sort of soothing syrup from the doctor and tried children’s aspirin in orange juice, but nothing seems to stop her 2–3 a.m. crying bout. I’ll probably see the doctor again this week …
I don’t know if I said in my last letter that my book costs about $2.15 (15 shillings) here, very reasonable compared to American prices, and my publisher is William Heinemann … Since I got no prize or any American publisher, they haven’t bothered to advertise it, so I probably won’t make a penny on it unless I get some award later to call it to the public’s attention—the 10 copies I ordered more than cancelled out my tiny pre-publication sale. Well, it’s a nice gift book … My publisher thought the acknowledgments were superfluous—only one or two magazines require them, and usually they are put in as a kind of courtesy to the magazines and bolstering of the writer’s ego. I’m glad they didn’t—my list was so long, it would have looked ostentatious. Both of us are getting more retiring about blazoning biographies and publication-notices everywhere.
… Ted has finished with his scheduled talks, lectures and commissions at last and is now free to work on his three-act play, and I shall see he is kept clear of all distractions. His broadcast translation of a passage from the Odyssey was very well reviewed in the Sunday papers, and I am going to hear myself read two poems over the radio Sunday night …
I hate to bother you about this again, but could you look around once more for the yellow paperbound Speedwriting book, or beg, borrow or steal another copy and airmail it to me? I have a chance at quite an amusing job later this year if I brush up my Speedwriting, which stood me in excellent stead with that exacting head of Harvard’s Sanskrit Department … I’m dying to get hold of it….
… Much love to you both from the three of us.
Sivvy
NOVEMBER 25, 1960
Dear Mother,
First of all, tell Warren how proud Ted and I are that he passed his Orals! From our permanent vacation over here, he sounds to be performing Herculean labors. How much chance is there that he might come to London for that conference? Can he apply for it? We would be overwhelmed with joy if he could come. He would be knocked silly by little Frieda….
Mrs. Prouty sent me a cheque for $150 to celebrate the publication of my book, the dear. I won’t earn another thing on that, so we’re putting it toward current expenses. Ted has the best story he’s done yet, about a fat man shooting rabbits at harvest-time, accepted by the BBC today, which will mean a nice sum. He’ll read it, and then it will probably be played twice, once in Christmas week. I’m going to send it to magazines in America now….
Helga Huws had a baby this week, her second daughter, Lucy Teresa. I visited her at the hospital and saw the little thing in the nursery—made me want another really small one
immediately. I would so like a permanent spacious place where I could have as many children as I wanted!
Let us know how Ted’s play sounds.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
NOVEMBER 28,1960
Dearest Mother,
I’m sitting here in the late evening, curtains drawn, the little Pifco warming the room cheerily, in my bathrobe, on one of Ted’s rare nights out. He has driven to Coventry with Dido Merwin and John Whiting, a playwright, to see Bill Merwin’s play at the repertory theatre there, The Golden West.
Bill is in America, collecting thousands on lectures and readings. Ted left about three and won’t be home till 3 or 4 a.m. as it’s a long drive, so I’ve had one of my rare, rare times to myself. I realize how crowded we are here when I am alone for a bit, enjoying every minute of it, feeling inclined to do little secret things I like …
I am now working very hard on something I never really attacked right—women’s magazine stories. Very rusty and awkward on my first, I got into the swing and am half through my second with a plot for a third … I also have a fine, lively agent (who wrote me about a story of mine in the London magazine) whom I have not met and who is affiliated with one of the best NYC agencies, and so, after I get my earliest acceptances in the many women’s weeklies here, they’ll send any stuff good enough to the Saturday Evening Post, etc. For the first time, I feel I know where I’m going …