… Whew! Best of all (if there can be any best—everything is so lovely) I have at last met Nathaniel LaMar, that boy from Exeter and Harvard who wrote the story “Creole Love Song” in the Atlantic! When I heard he was at Cambridge, I begged some boys at Pembroke to introduce me to him, so last night, Richard [Mansfield] and I caught him on the walk, and I have a tea-date with him next Sunday. He is a lovely, light-skinned Negro, and I look most forward to talking to him about writing, etc….
… My favorite, tall, dark, handsome fellow, Mallory Wober, has just invited me to meet some of his friends at a sherry party before dinner. My project for meeting as large a cross-section of people possible this first term is certainly working out most pleasantly. I have simply been treated like a queen! …
Your joyous birthday girl,
Sivvy
OCTOBER 29, 1955
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
At last I am beginning to feel a native of Cambridge and want to take time in the midst of this pleasant carousel of activity on a multitude of new fronts to tell you a little about how happy I am here! …
I am most interested in acting now, and my ambition is to audition again and again until I get a part in one of the big plays. There is a companionship and fervor in producing a play which is equalled by nothing else: by the opening night, one feels a great rapport with everybody from the leading man to the electrician and wardrobe mistress!
Next, I want to begin writing again in December, when I am not so intensely involved in the immediate prospect of discovering all that Cambridge has to offer by way of people, books, scenes, and events. Plans for vacation are still very tentative, but I hope dreamily for Paris, the Mediterranean (The Sun), and perhaps a bit of skiing in the Alps.
Instead of wishing rather frantically, as I once did, to be brilliant, creative, and successful all at once, I now have a steadier, more practical approach which admits my various limitations and blind spots and works a little day by day to overcome them slowly without expecting immediate, or even eventual, perfection. Life is rich, full, and I am discovering more about it by living here every challenging day.
I’ll write again soon. Meanwhile, much much love to you.
Sylvia
NOVEMBER 7, 1955
Dearest Mother,
It is a wet, warm, gray November day, and the yellow-green trees are letting go their leaves in the sodden wind. The week has been crowded with books and people, and I am slowly learning by experience the kind of life I want most to live here. With so many challenges on all fronts, academic, social, and extracurricular, I have to be firmly disciplined in choosing.
To sum up the past days: I saw a good bit of that outgoing, creative Negro boy, Nathaniel LaMar . . . and went to coffee with him Monday at the bohemian coffee house here where I had the first really good, open "bull session" I've had since I've been here. Temperamentally, Nat is very much like me, enthusiastic, demonstrative, and perhaps trusting and credulous to the point of naiveté. A strong contrast to the Englishmen, who have a kind of brittle, formal rigidity and, many of them, a calculated sophisticate pose. . . .
Also went out to dinner at the Union (the one place in Cambridge where women are not allowed unless escorted: the Debate Club) and saw a rather good production of my favorite I Am a Camera . . . which made me want to turn immediately to writing again. Acting simply takes up too much time. I was really glad I didn't get a part in the coming production of Bartholomew Fair (although, of course, it injured my ego slightly) because I have so much reading to do, and I would rather be a mediocre writer than a bad actress.
. . . One of the Cambridge "little magazines" has accepted two of my poems and I'm meeting the editor this afternoon. I feel about increasing my scope of reading much as I did about my thesis: I know it will take place eventually, but am irritated sometimes at the slowness.
Love to all–
Sivvy
NOVEMBER 14, 1955
Dearest Mother,
… There are several frustrations in my work, which, although I allowed for them abstractly, nevertheless bother me still, while I do my best to take them easily. In the first place, the girls in my practical criticism hour have a much broader background than I in the periods of literature, and so I am utterly left out when they have to “date” bits of prose and poetry from 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Naturally, none of the selections are from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Russians, and only very rarely from the 19th or 20th, so I feel very ignorant. There is no preparation I can do for this class, except to read, very slowly, as I am doing, through the poetry of these centuries. Also, in my “supervision” in tragedy, with the same woman, Miss Burton, I again feel enormous handicaps reading, as it were, in a vacuum where I have had no background … in Restoration Tragedy. I’ve done only one paper for her so far on Corneille, which, in spite of the fact I read the plays in my still rusty French, seemed to be acceptable, although we get no marks and just discuss them with our tutor. These are my two most painful hours in the week … the kind of reading I have to do slowly to remedy this too-early over-specialization of mine is exactly what I wanted to come here to do, but it is still often difficult, in face of some of these glib girls, to compete on levels where my own lack of reading stands in my way. Occasionally, I would just like to catch them off guard with our early American Literature!
… I could read all day every day for the rest of my life and still be behind, so I do balance my mornings of lectures (which I do love) and reading with a kind of cultural and social life. People are still infinitely more important to me than books, so I will never be an academic scholar. I know this and know also that my kind of vital intellectual curiosity could never be happy in the grubbing detail of a PhD thesis. I simply don’t believe that kind of specialization is for me. I like to read widely, in art, psychology, philosophy, French, and literature, and to live and see the world and talk deeply with people in it and to write my own poetry and prose, rather than becoming a pedantic expert on some minor writer of 200 years back, simply because he has not been written about yet. Ideally, I would like to write in at least half of my vacations here and publish enough to get some sort of writing fellowship, Saxton or Guggenheim, which would let me live without academic obligations (which I can make up myself after these two years) and write steadily, which is impossible here during the packed term. This is all rather private musing, and I would rather you kept it in the family and shared the more extroverted passages with other people.
Perhaps what I do miss most here is the lack of my friends who have known me in my past. I can’t explain fully how much it means to have people who have shared years of one’s life and with whom you can assume a deep understanding and common experience …
While I am very happy here and have many too many invitations to accept even half, all my acquaintances are at the same “historical stage” in knowing, and it takes only much time to achieve anything like the deep and vital friendships I left behind me at home. Everyone here is so “new” and untried. I am glad that I am outgoing and open and intense now, because I can slice into the depths of people more quickly and more rewardingly than if I were superficial and formal.
NOVEMBER 21, 1955
To continue: It is a lovely blue and gold day. When it is nice here it is “very very nice, and when it is bad, it is horrid.” I have become used to clouds of frosted air surrounding me as I breathe in the bathtub and to concentrating on the cloud formations outside the dining room windows as I eat my soggy, sludgy mass of daily starch foods. My room is more and more a delight, and I now have my big earthenware plate heaped with a pyramid of fruit: apples, oranges, pineapples, bananas, grapes, and a large vase of bright yellow dahlias, which bring the sun inside to worship….
Dick Wertz, Sassoon’s roommate at Yale … dropped over … and we had the first good talk we’ve ever had. I have been constantly surprised how much I miss Sassoon, who is now at the Sorbonne, and spent hours talking about him with Dick. Ironically enough,
the boys here are Sassoon’s age, but in maturity and integration they are babies compared to him. Having created such vivid, brilliant worlds of talk and people and plays and art exhibits and all those many minute and important things that make up shared experience, I find fragments of the things I so admired and appreciated in him scattered here and there among other chaps, but naturally miss not having them all together….
Friday, I had a lovely time with the first English boy I’ve met who is temperamentally like me: David Buck. He played the lead in one of the ADC nurseries (Dr. Triceps in Mirbeau’s Epidemic), and I have admired him ever since. He is reading English in his first year, after serving two years in the Army in Germany, and is very strong and versatile. He is a champion swimmer and has a large role in Bartholomew Fair, where I have five lines as a rather screaming bawdy woman who gets into a fight. I think I will do it, even if it is so little a part, because it will give me a kind of stage presence and keep me active in the ADC…. Anyway, David and I had sherry at his room in Christ’s (I still can’t get over the way people casually talk about: “Come on over to Jesus” or “I live in Christ’s”!)
Saturday, we went to visit the editor of the “big” magazine at Cambridge where, at David’s recommendation, I left a few stories and poems. David writes for them, too. We lunched at The Eagle, one of the arty buffet pubs in town, which was lots of fun.
Saturday afternoon, Mallory took me punting on the Cam, which was lovely, as he looks like a dark-haired, red-cheeked Jewish Greek god (if that is possible), standing at the helm and poling along perfectly straight (a feat) under the bridges where people leaned over and stared and took pictures; and he told me about the Cambridge architecture we could see. Afterwards, he came back for tea at my place (I had fixed up the room with fruit and flowers and gotten all kinds of breads and cakes—I love to have people in for a change, after going out so much). I had refused another date for the evening, as I figured it would be anticlimactic, so I just sat and mused nostalgically on the paradoxes of life.
Yesterday was most amazing. I was, as I said, to have gone to Ely with John [another boyfriend], but Mallory had invited me to lunch, and it was a bad day, so I left a note on my door, telling whoever read it to come to tea; and Mallory delivered a note to John, postponing [my] seeing him. Well, Mallory took me and some of his Jewish friends from Israel around King’s and the chapel, which was exquisite at dusk with all the colored stained-glass windows (which Mallory explained the stories of and the history and architecture) and myriads of candles and lacy fan-vaulted ceiling.
Then Mallory played the “Emperor Concerto” on his vic and “Greensleeves” and some other favorite ballads on his piano for me. We were biking back to my place with sandwiches for tea-lunch when John pulled up on his motorcycle, having read the note on my door and not having got my letter. Well, nothing remained but to have them both for tea, which bothered me a bit as they are very different, John being most shy and sensitive and retiring and Mallory being outwardly very witty and amusing. Believe it or not, they both stayed from 4 till 10 at night, talking about everything from “Is there a purpose to the universe” to the Belgian Congo—no mention of supper! John left only after I invited him to tea today, and Mallory took me to a lovely late steak dinner at the Taj. My first “salon,” and most stimulating.
x x x Sivvy
TUESDAY MORNING
NOVEMBER 22, 1955
Dearest Mother,
Your Saturday letter arrived today, and I felt the impulse to sit down and answer it, even though I’ve told you most of the relevant news in yesterday’s note. I must admit that now that Christmas draws near, I, too, feel occasional waves of deep homesickness flood over me which makes me want to go about and announce publicly from the cobbled corners in Cambridge just what a wonderful mother and brother and grandparents and friends I have and how noble and tragic and self-denying a figure I am to be away from all those I love so much for so long. No matter how old one is, there is so often the need to “let down” and spill over to those of one’s own flesh and blood, who accept one simply for oneself, without making any demands.
When you think of it, it is so little of our lives we really spend with those we love. I … resent being away from Warren so much while he is growing and becoming a man, and I long to spend time with him and learn to know him and have him know me as I am growing to be, too….
I shall be happy to carry your Christmas present with me wherever I go, and, probably in a cold and snowy Paris, open it on The Day. Perhaps the most difficult thing for me to keep up is writing letters to other people, who have been most wonderful about writing me. I get a large satisfaction about writing you, and also my brilliant and sympathetic Richard [Sassoon] who, from Paris, makes me feel I have a strong partisan just over the channel….
… I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham. Daily we rather merciless and merry Americans, South Africans, and Scottish students remark the types at the dons’ table, which range from a tall, cadaverous woman with purple hair (really!) to a midget Charles Addams fat creature who has to stand on a stool to get into the soup tureen. They are all very brilliant or learned (quite a different thing) in their specialized ways, but I feel that all their experience is secondary [second-hand?] and this to me is tantamount to a kind of living death. I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people’s minds and souls. I am blessed with great desires to give of love and time, and find that people respond to this. It is often tempting to hide from the blood and guts of life in a neat special subject on paper where one can become an unchallenged expert, but I, like Yeats, would rather say: “It was my glory that I had such friends,” when I finally leave the world.
… I have a feeling that I love dear Mallory primarily because he is a kind of substitute … for Warren: strong, handsome, with a kind of integrity and strange dearness which is so tempting to help mold.
I really feel that I could be a fine creator of children’s souls. Preferably my own children, where intense love could be involved, as well as the teaching part!
I do enjoy your advice and feel very close to you in your letters. Shall talk to Miss Burton after December 3 when I give her my renewal application to fill out and the hectic term is over and I can prepare a serious discussion. I do love you all so very dearly.
Much love,
Sivvy
NOVEMBER 26, 1955
… Received your wonderful packed envelope of articles yesterday and enjoyed it no end. You have no idea how I love such juicy collections of items: I understand how important it was to send letters and news of art and incidental home affairs to the soldiers overseas: it keeps the image of home alive and vital, for it is by specific details that we recreate the atmosphere of family and love.
… Bartholomew Fair began this last Thursday night and will continue until Saturday, December 3, so all my evenings are taken up. Our opening night was cold (many critics from London were there, and we got a long, if rather critical, review in the London Times), and I must admit that the play’s production is a herculean task, even for pro companies … Our costumes come from the wardrobe at Stratford-on-Avon, and I have a long-sleeved gown of vivid yellow satin, which is much fun. Unless I get something like the part of Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida, I shall let this stage and grease-paint part of my life go and become a more private person. I must say, though, that instead of frittering my time on small teas or avant garde movies, all very nice in themselves, I enjoy working with these boys and girls to create something and not just sitting around to talk and gossip and be passive. The ADC is my extracurricular life, and I am too much a part of this world to become a passive beholder. I want to be out on the stage, too, and create in any way, no matter how small.
… I am just finishing with the
dregs of a very undermining sinus cold and fever which kept me confined to quarters for the last three days … I must tell you what an absolute Rock of Gibraltar Mallory has been to me! To begin with, I had an Ibsen paper to write, French to do, and classes, and the nightly appearances seemed endless. Well, Mallory called for me every night at the stage door of the theater and biked home with me … always bringing a ritual apple which we ate by the garden gate at Whitstead….
Last Sunday, before the deluge of this week, I shared the most magnificent experience with him: Advent service at the King’s Chapel. Since Mallory belongs to King’s College, he got two tickets. Honestly, mother, I never have been so moved in my life. It was evening, and the tall chapel, with its cobweb lace of fan-vaulting, was lit with myriads of flickering candles, which made fantastic shadows play on the walls, carved with crowns and roses. The King’s choir boys processed down through the chapel singing in that clear bell-like way children have: utterly pure and crystal notes.
I remembered all the lovely Christmas times we’ve had as a family, caroling with our dear friends, and the tears just streamed down my face in a kind of poignant joy. The organ pealed out and the hymn was that magnificent one “Wachet Auf” (“Now Let Every Tongue Adore Thee”) which was so beautifully familiar …
DECEMBER 10, 1955
Dearest Mother,
My wonderful Christmas box came yesterday, and I can’t tell you how lovely it was! … I immediately devoured a large number of the fresh, delicious hazelnuss [hazelnut] cookies and that unique flavor, which I have never encountered anywhere except at home around Christmas, brought back a flood of memories, much the way a certain song or scent can evoke whole portions of the past….