Oh well, something will work out. I’ll keep fighting.
Lots of love,
Your rejected offspring, Sivvy
JANUARY 29, 1955
Dear Mother,
Just thought I’d sit down and write you a little note on this bright sunny day. I hope you are much better and am sure that a good part of your attack (which you are so careful not to elaborate upon) was due to worry and brooding … I don’t know whether it is an hereditary characteristic, but our little family is altogether too prone to lie awake at nights hating ourselves for stupidities—technical or verbal or whatever—and to let careless, cruel remarks fester until they blossom in something like ulcer attacks—I know that during these last days I’ve been fighting an enormous battle with myself.
But beyond a point, fighting only wears one out and one has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.
… Your present life is the important thing, and it must be relaxed and happy—not becoming so only after countless postponements….
… I’ve decided to rewrite the “In the Mountains” … so it will be suitable for Seventeen in spring vacation. It is not suitable now and needs much more development of the inner struggle of the girl. It was an attempt to be understated and cryptic as Hemingway, which is fine for a lit. course, but not for 17.
Then, too, I am not sending the Mary Ventura story to the Christophers [contest]. I think it is much too fantastic and symbolic for what they want. They want warm, simple stories that will inspire people to go out and do likewise, and I don’t think they want everyone in the U.S.A. jumping off speeding trains in the subway!
These last three days, I have done up some very good stories if I do say so. I wrote two for the Christophers, tailored for specifications, both based on a Bible quote, very plotted and noble, but not preaching. One is about a housewife (“Home Is Where the Heart Is”), who comes to mental crisis, faced by a family that seems to be seeking life outside the home. She manages creatively to bring them all back together. The other is even more dramatic—set in a hospital waiting room with flashbacks (I’ve read up on TV requirements and limitations and been realistic in my sets, main characters, and immediate interest angle), called “Tomorrow Begins Today,” about what one teenager can do in channeling energies of high school students from destructive to creative channels. Both are under 10 pages, very decisive and forthright, and I think I have a much better chance than possible with a vague symbolic tale like “The Ninth Kingdom.”
Also have rewritten my two best Kazin stories and am sending both off to Mile’s short story contest, answering Cyrilly Abels recent letter that she is looking forward to see my new stories “eagerly.” I am very proud of both of these stories—have digested thoroughly and rewritten critically (as you suggested, there has been a cooling time lapse since the first copy).
They seem to like a balance in their two winning stories, so one of mine, “The Day Mr. Prescott Died,” is a sassily told humorous one (with real human interest, seriously, under it) in the first person. The other, a very dark story, is the best work of “art” I’ve ever done, I think. It is called “Tongues of Stone” (my favorite title yet) and is all very bleak and beautifully written, with a crisis and turn for the better at the immediate end. This was the one Mr. Kazin wrote his lovely letter to me about—saying that, thank God, I was a writer, but that writing was invented to give more joy than that story—so I took his advice and changed it from life to art—gave it a conclusion of dawn, instead of eternal night, which to me just makes it right.
I have a feeling that I may be destined to be more successful in writing than I thought at first. If any of these come through, I may well be able to go to Europe in spite of Dean Rogers, write there, learn French and German, and come back a better person. The reason why Miss Chase advised England is the free time to write there, which I long for. If either Oxford or Cambridge should accept me, I will go without a Fulbright. That I know. I shall get $2,000 somehow if I have the chance to go!
The Columbia application came today, so with fast work at the beginning of the week, before classes start for me Wednesday night, thank God, I should be able to get the necessary letters under way. They ask for thesis or other academic work, and bless Miss Page for having me make an extra carbon! … At Columbia you have to write an MA thesis, as you don’t at Harvard, so my writing time would be almost nil. And writing is the first love of my life. I have to live well and rich and far to write, so that is all good. I could never be a narrow introvert writer, the way many are, for my writing depends so much on my life.
Chin up, mother, and get well for me! Do all you can to put me at ease about that! Love to all.
Your very own Sivvy
FEBRUARY 2, 1955
Dearest Mother,
… Snow has come here, and the bleak, black winter sets in, all of which provide many metaphors for poetry. Nothing more, I’m convinced of it, could happen in a discouraging way. The Journal sent my story back, saying that the narrative improved the writing, but it lacked an “indefinable something” that made a Journal piece. At present, I begin to feel that I lack that “indefinable something” that makes a winner.
Fortunately, I’m happier in the midst of these refusals than I was two years ago on the crest of my success wave. Which just shows what a positive philosophy can do. I’d be scared if I just kept on winning things. I do deserve a streak of rejection …
… I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives. On the risk of your considering “Temper of Time” “depressing,” I am sending you the 3 latest examples of my lyrics. Read aloud for word tones, for full effect. Understand that “Temper of Time,” while ominous, is done tongue in cheek, after a collection of vivid metaphors of omen from the thesaurus, which I am rapidly wearing out. It is a kind of pun on the first page of the NY Times, which has news much like this every morning.
Some day Phyllis McGinley will hear from me. They can’t shut me up.
The Christophers wrote a nice letter about receiving the stories, saying “God Bless You” and ‘Sincerely in Christ,” which struck me as rather ironic in the midst of all this flurry of rejections, literary and academic.
However, my typewriter won’t be still. This summer I am going to write a pack of stories, read magazines religiously (as every Writer’s Manual advises) and capitalize on my growing powers of neat articulation. And I am going to SELL “The Smoky Blue Piano” somewhere.
Now I can see the advantage of an agent—she keeps you from the little deaths every writer goes through whenever a manuscript comes back home. It’s like having your child refused admittance to public school. You love it, and often can’t see why. Read one encouraging story about a successful writer who wrote 10 stories in 10 months, and her agent collected 81 (!) rejections and not one acceptance. But the author gaily began her 11th story. Very encouraging!
Much love to my favorite mummy, and keep well for me. That’s the one thing you can do for me and for Warren! We love you so much.
A kiss for the tip of your Grecian nose!
Love, Sivvy
APPAREL FOR APRIL
Hills sport tweed for
april’s back,
world parades her
birthday frock.
Clouds don laces
and white linen,
all the sky is
light blue denim.
Air is clear as
honeydew,
in pink tiaras
daisies blow.
Daffodil puts
on frilled yellow,
fringe of veil suits
greening willow.
Crocus struts in
amethyst,
robins button
scarlet vest.
Squirrel brushes
silver fur,
river flashes
jeweled hair.
Sunlight gilds f
air
boy and girl,
apparels them for
pastoral.
Tricked with clover
is the land,
with leaf and lover
wreathed around.
Lest spring bequeath me
nakedness,
o sweet one, clothe me
with a kiss.
TEMPER OF TIME
An ill wind is stalking while
Evil stars whir
And all the gold apples go
Bad to the core.
Black birds of omen now
Prowl on the bough
And the forest is littered with
Bills that we owe.
Through closets of copses tall
Skeletons walk
While nightshade and nettles
Tangle the track.
In the ramshackle meadow where
Kilroy would pass
Lurks the sickle-shaped shadow of
Snake in the grass.
Approaching his cottage by
Crooked detour
He hears the gruff knocking of
Wolf at the door.
His wife and his children hang
Riddled with shot,
There’s a hex on the cradle and
Death in the pot.
WINTER WORDS
In the pale prologue
of daybreak
tongues of intrigue
cease to speak.
Moonshine splinters
as birds hush;
transfixed the antlers
in the bush.
With fur and feather,
buck and cock
softly author
icebound book.
No Chinese painter’s
brown and buff
could quill a quainter
calligraph.
On stilted legs the
bluejays go
their minor leagues a
cross the snow,
inscribing cryptic
anagrams
on their skeptic
search for crumbs.
Chipmunks enter
stripes of black
in the winter
almanac.
A scribbling squirrel
makes a blot
of gray apparel,
hides a nut.
On chastely figured
trees and stones
fate is augured
in bleak lines
With shorthand scratches
on white scroll
bark of birches
tells a tale.
Ice like parchment
shrouds the pond,
marred by misprint
of north wind.
Windowpane wears
gloss of frost
till dawnlight blurs
and all’s erased.
Before palaver
of the sun
learn from this graver
lexicon:
Read godly fiction
in rare flake,
spell king’s direction
from deer track.
{Postcard}
FEBRUARY 5, 1955
Dear Mother,
Got the first really encouraging note from Dean of Radcliffe today (Rogers sent her my letter), saying my not winning the Woodrow Wilson “would in no way weaken” my chances for a grant at Radcliffe and the WW’s were given mostly for men who might otherwise go into business, law, medicine, etc. Obviously, Rogers wrote her why I didn’t get a WW, and it no doubt was not for character blots only, as I had thought.
Poems come better and better, and my courses, if demanding, are fiery and delightful. I feel much better about my prospects now that I have spread my applications out to include interesting job and Columbia (although my roster of choice goes [1] Fulbright to England, [2] teaching in Morocco, [3] Radcliffe and Columbia). Keep all your fingers crossed.
FEBRUARY 11, 1955
Dear Mother,
Happy Valentine’s Day … Life here is in that nasty, fickle stage between winter and spring, and I have written several very good poems which I think you will like …
I am very proud of my brother but am afraid I cannot boast as much about marks. My Shakespeare wavers toward a B+ and my German is also only a B—. But I like both courses very much and feel that my writing deserves what it is getting by way of time.
Now for the money. The only way I would accept your kind offer of a monthly loan is that it was unequivocally understood it was a loan and that I would pay it back by graduation … quite frankly, I have used up all my 2nd semester funds already and have been forced to sell some of my old clothes and possessions to keep myself in postage stamps. [Actually, as I learned recently from Warren, this poignant story of selling her clothes was a coverup for a secret trip to New York with Sassoon—apparently her suitcase had been stolen from the car in the city.] In spite of strict budget and absolutely no amusements (I depend on my dates for food, plays, and wine), I would need, after your first $25 check, about $10–$15 a month, I think. I do appreciate this, as I refuse to borrow from authorities and was fully expecting to be hauled into court for my 2nd semester book bills!
Now, about the Morocco job. I thought I would wait until my interview with Mr. Robert Shea, head of the American School in Tangier, today before countering all your arguments, which I now feel very justified in doing.
I was sorry that you jumped to hasty conclusions about both the job and my future plans before waiting to hear the facts.
… I would be expected to do nothing more than learn from the expert teacher who shared my grade and to teach the whole grade, all courses, which would be a remarkably versatile training for me. I believe that in America much too much emphasis is put on courses, with the idea that anything from cooking to writing can be mastered if a course certificate is had.
… I do not want state certification or more years sitting at a desk learning how to teach when I can live and learn from the best international community. This is the beginning of my professional training. The “veteran” teachers in Tangier are, if anything, more skilled and versatile than those here … A lively love and general education and creative outlook are what they want. They will train themselves.
… Sue [Weller] and I would live in an apartment (the most luxurious, with patio and five or six rooms is $50 a month!) and do our own cooking (food is abundant, especially fruit and vegetables). We would have a maid to purchase for us because her salary would cost no more than what we would be cheated out of as foreigners at the public markets.
… The international outlook is the coming world view, and I hope to be a part of that community with all I have in me. I am young enough to learn languages by living and not the artificial acceleration or plodding of “book” courses. I want people opposite me at tables, at desks, not merely books.
… Mr. Shea is like the intelligent, loving, liberal father I have always longed for, and I can think of no man except Mr. Crockett who so much made me think that there are saints on earth, with a radiance and love of service and helping others to grow which is almost superhuman. The easy-going, sunny nature of this man attracted me from the first…. He is an international Mr. Crockett and he gave up an international job as diplomat in Persia because he loved the project of this school so much.
During my divine poetry hour with Mr. Fisher today, I discussed all this in detail, and he said, after approving heartily (he, too, was dubious about it last week when the complete facts weren’t known), “Do you really want this job?” I assented earnestly, and he left the room a moment. When he came back, he said he’d just called the man, who was in the middle of interviews, and given me the highest recommendation he could think of. Such dearness I can hardly believe!
Mr. Fisher is the ideal reader and professor for me, for my particular poetry. Week by week I can feel the growth and heightened sensitivity sprouting up inside me … and I believe I am experiencing the most stimulating, cr
eative process of two minds meeting and growing—I learn so much from him, and in turn I feel I am giving all that is in me, and he is happy with it.
… I have always wanted to combine my creative urges with a kind of service to the world. I am not a missionary in the narrow sense, but I do believe I can counteract McCarthy and much adverse opinion about the U.S. by living a life of honesty and love amidst these people for a short time. It is, in a way, serving my religion, which is that of humanism, and a belief in the potential of each man to learn and love and grow: these children, their underdeveloped lands, their malnutrition—all these factors are not the neat rigid American ideals, but I believe the new races are going to influence the world in turn, much as America did in her day, and, however small my part, I want a share in giving to them.
I know what my professors have done for me…. Even if my level is only making a Mexican get excited about history or dramatizing a government problem simply to recreate an abstract idea vividly, this is what I would like. This is for now. For perhaps only one year. I hope after that to be a much more linguistic and experienced woman. Maybe I’ll be a reporter. Or a poet living in Italy. Or a student at Radcliffe. The important thing is that the choice grows naturally out of my life and is not imposed on it by well-meaning friends. Do consider what I say seriously. I hope you understand.
x x sivvy
{Postcard}
FEBRUARY 15, 1955
Dear Mother,
… You’ll be happy to hear of an ecstatic coffee hour spent at the home of my dearest friend, Mary Ellen Chase, discussing my plans for next year, which have suddenly taken a bright turn. Cambridge University accepted me as a foreign affiliate for 2-year program for honors B.A.—M.A. is automatic, and all colleges in America will hold out arms to me as teacher. Whole English department here is behind me and against machine-made American grad degrees. If Fulbright doesn’t come, will get money somehow. Don’t tell anyone except grandparents and Warren, but it looks like what I’ve always wanted in my secret heart.