This week has been both pleasant and difficult. I realize now that it parallels that “unfolding” period I always go through when first I come home on vacation: I plan lots of work for every day and then just drift about, sleeping, playing the piano, eating and assimilating—lying fallow, in preparation for beginning to be creative again. It is always hard, though, for me not to demand that I show a profitable work schedule for every spare minute. Well, I can work harder and better this coming week here for having rested and relaxed in this one …
My dear Mallory has stayed on to work (and will go home to London tomorrow) and has come over every day for tea and the evening. I haven’t had such a healthy “co-ed” life since high school, really. Instead of going off on gay tangents of plays, wine and extravagant holidays on weekends as I used to at college, I live very simply, and much of my time with Mallory is spent placidly listening to music, reading aloud, making tea, biking, and just talking … Wednesday, I had dear, lovable Nat LaMar over for tea with Mallory and the three of us had a most pleasant time. Nat has already left for Paris and promised to get me some really cheap hotel reservations on the Left Bank, which should be a relief to have on arrival.
… I wish you could meet him [Mallory]. His mother would like me to come and stay with them in London … I shall probably visit them next Sunday … and stay there a few days on my return from Paris. Evidently Mallory’s relatives are all gathering around to see me, too, for it is an Event to have a “Christian” girl accepted, I gather. Ironically enough, I am not really a Christian in the true sense of the word, but more of an ethical culturist: labels don’t matter, but I am close to the Jewish beliefs in many ways. This family should be fascinating: the English Jews are a contradiction in terms—the vivid warmth and love in their personalities I find very close to home.
… Paris is a tremendous challenge, and I’m glad I won’t be facing it alone … Nat and Sassoon should be a blessing at escorting me through the blazing lights and wonders of this city that never sleeps (not like London, which shuts up shop promptly at 11!). Know that I am thinking of you with much much love and rather a bit of wistfulness this Christmas.
Your own loving
Sylvia
DECEMBER 13, 1955
Dear dear Mrs. Prouty!
… I didn’t realize how much I had been longing to talk to you until I actually began! Again, I have decided that I would like to combine writing (which I hope to be doing in my long vacation, & especially this summer) of simple short stories about people I know and problems I have met in life with a home & children. I love cooking and “homemaking” a great deal, and am neither destined to be a scholar (only vividly interested in books, not research, as they stimulate my thoughts about people and life) nor a career girl, and I really begin to think I might grow to be quite a good mother, and that I would learn such an enormous lot by extending my experience of life this way!
Perhaps the hardest thing I have to accept in life is “not being perfect” in any way, but only striving in several directions for expression: in living (with people and in the world), and writing, both of which activities paradoxically limit and enrich each other. Gone is the simple college cycle of winning prizes, and here is the more complex, less clear-cut arena of life, where there is no single definite aim, but a complex degree of aims, with no prizes to tell you you’ve done well. Only the sudden flashes of joy that come when you commune deeply with another person, or see a particularly golden mist at sunrise, or recognize on paper a crystal expression of a thought that you never expected to write down.
The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities. Sometimes, I wonder if I am strong enough to meet this challenge, and I sincerely hope I will grow to be responsible not only for myself, but for those I love most. These thoughts are some of the intangibles I’ve been working out here, in the midst of the outer active, stimulating life. One doesn’t get prizes for this increasing awareness, which sometimes comes with an intensity indistinguishable from pain.
I wanted to share my inmost thoughts with you as well as the bright texture of my active days. Do you know how very much I think of you: how I remember our wonderful long discussions over tea and sherry in your living room (which has become a second home to me) and at the Brookline Country Club that lovely evening last summer!
Christmas has always been for me the time of reunion with those dearest people one carries in one’s heart through the separation and work of the year. At this time, I want you to know that in spirit I am very close to you, loving you dearly, more than words can tell….
… my very best love to you….
Your loving
Sylvia
DECEMBER 14, 1955
Dearest Mother,
… I am making out my re-application for a Fulbright this week and feel sorry that it will be judged completely on what I have done this term, as I just feel my head above water now, and my roots taking firm grip. All this term has been ‘living,” experiencing life widely so I can select a disciplined program for the rest of this year without that tantalizing distracting sense of the “untried.” I am giving up the ADC for writing regularly a few hours a day, cutting my class schedule so I can do more reading and meditating, and narrowing my social life down to Mallory and one or two good friends, but I had to try everything to be able to choose with such sureness: “You can never know enough without knowing more than enough,” as Blake says: “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
I am really sure the Fulbright won’t be renewed … I will probably be able to live and travel abroad in these two long winter and spring vacations, but lord knows what about the three-month summer. My one hope is that in my writing later this vac (I’m coming back here ten days early before term) and during next term something salable may turn up. But I am rather pessimistic about it. With the return of my Borestone Mountain manuscript, all my pigeons are home to roost. Gone are the days where I got prizes for everything. This mature-market competition demands constant writing, so instead of waiting for a whole bulk of time, which I come to rusty and paralytic, I am going to do an hour or two every day, like Czerny exercises on the piano. I want to get enough written so I can have several things out and get rid of this sense of a financial deadend—even intangible hope is a better state! …
{Postcard}
NICE, FRANCE
JANUARY 7, 1956
Dear Mother,
Yesterday was about the most lovely in my life. Started out on motor scooter along famous wide “promenade des anglais” of Nice, with its out-door cafés, splendid baroque facades, rows of palms, strolling musicians—and headed inland to Vence, where I planned to see the beautiful recent Matisse cathedral of my art magazine, which I’ve loved via pictures for years.
How can I describe the beauty of the country? Everything is so small, close, exquisite and fertile. Terraced gardens on steep slopes of rich red earth, orange and lemon trees, olive orchards, tiny pink and peach houses. To Vence—small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral—small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue tile roof sparkling in the sun. But shut! Only open to public two days a week. A kindly talkative peasant told me stories of how rich people came daily in large cars from Italy, Germany, Sweden, etc., and were not admitted, even for large sums of money. I was desolate and wandered to the back of the walled nunnery, where I could see a corner of the Chapel and sketched it, feeling like Alice outside the garden, watching the white doves and orange trees. Then I went back to the front and stared with my face through the barred gate. I began to cry. I knew it was so lovely inside, pure white with the sun through blue, yellow, and green stained windows.
A handwritten postcard, 1956
Then I heard a voice, “Ne pleurez plus, entrez,” and the Mother Superior let me in, after denying all the wealthy people in ca
rs.
I just knelt in the heart of sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel. “Vous êtes si gentille,” I stammered. The nun smiled. “C’est la miséricorde de Dieu.” It was.
Love,
Sylvia
WHITSTEAD, BARTON ROAD
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 10, 1956
Dearest of Mothers,
Happy New Year! It seems almost impossible to be sitting back in my lovely room at Whitstead again, with three magnificent packed weeks in France behind me. So much to tell! I feel unbelievably refreshed, seething with ideas, rested, ready to write and work hard and deeply for the next three months. The academic year is ideal for my system, which works in large cycles, needing frequent alternations between intense periods of work and play. My New Year mood is so different from the rather lonely, weary, depressed and slightly fearful state in which I left Cambridge a mere three weeks ago. Coming “back” here for this first time made me feel this is truly home, and my vacation has given me an invaluable perspective on my life, work and purpose here which I had lost in the complex overstimulation of the first semester. I now feel strong and sure. There is nothing like experience to give one widened horizons and confidence! …
I must admit that my heart is with the French! The contrast coming back to England was really painful….
… I am going to study French like mad this term to crystallize verbs and idioms (the hardest). My ear is excellent, and all the French say my pronunciation is perfect. So now I have to work on correct details and the eternal vocabulary building. Could hardly understand the harsh Cockney of London, the bored, impersonal, dissatisfied faces of the working class, the cold walls between people in train compartments.
But Cambridge is selling daffodils and tulips in the snow, and I bought an armful of bananas, apples, grapes, and oranges at market today. Am looking forward to a term of writing and work.
Love to all,
Sivvy
JANUARY 16, 1956
Dearest of Mothers,
… Oh, mummy, I am so happy that you are coming, there are tears in my eyes! I would love to show you London, too, as I can get around rather well now, and perhaps together we could take a trip to the parts of England you want most to see, as I have seen nothing but Cambridge and London and have been saving the rest for the summer, which will be fairer to England than any other time! Your trip plans make me glow with joy. If Warren gets his Experiment in Living Fellowship, all will be perfect. What a cosmopolitan, international family we shall become!
… Now, blessedly, my fears of traveling are gone, vanished completely. I was so scared, really, when I started out. It is one thing to dream a panorama of international travel and another to be faced with limited time and money and practical problems of choice and selectivity….
Gradually … my plans for spring emerge. I think I will devote it to Italy: Venice, Florence, Milan and Rome. I would much rather live in one country for my brief 3-week vacation and know it well, from the heart (which is the way I feel about France, even though I haven’t spent any time in the château country). It is amazing how plans take shape. This summer is a large question mark; but if Warren is in Germany, I would like to settle at least a week or so in his town and see him as much as possible, too. Also want very much to see Spain and Greece. Dear Elly Friedman [Smith classmate] writes she is coming in summer, so perhaps we can go together a bit; two is so much cheaper than one!
Felt extremely moved and homesick when I saw a magnificent German-Jugoslav movie, Die Letzte Brücke, Saturday night. Understood more of the German than I thought; missed Warren and you terribly. While being temperamentally a good deal more French and southern, I instinctively love German as my “mother and father” tongue and cursed myself for dropping it over the summer and this last busy term. I want so much to pick it up again and go on reading. It is the daily process of a little reading that keeps a language alive, not monumental future projects. I do want to live in German-speaking countries this summer, too, with books, and study it the ideal way—speaking, reading, going to plays, and being surrounded with German.
Here: I found it both home and hard, coming back to the atrocious food, the damp cold, and the unsimpatico people (compared with the loving French, who are kindred spirits). You ask about girl friends: well, the English girls are impossible: intellectually brilliant in their own fields of zoology or math, but emotionally and socially like nervous, fluttery adolescent teen-agers (probably a result of being kept apart from boys in school all during adolescence). A beautiful blonde Marshall Scholar is as close to a “best” friend as I have (she is in English and writing, too, in Whitstead) but she goes around with a Scotch girl most of the time, and there is, somehow, a subtle sense of rivalry between us. I do miss my dear Sue Weller. Close girl friends are difficult here because of the intensely individual and concentrated nature of our separate studies, but I do like [her] very much.
Am beginning to write slowly, painfully. Just finished two 8-page reportorial essays, one on Cambridge, one on Paris and Nice from which stories will grow (the Vence-Matisse-Cathedral one has several possibilities as article, story and essay)…. But I can live on the golden fat of these past rich three months like a bear hibernating through the Russian winter and write now.
Love—
Sivvy
JANUARY 17, 1956
… I found myself feeling rather desperate during Bartholomew Fair, at having no inner life to speak of. “Muteness is sickness” for me, as Richard Wilbur says, and I felt a growing horror at my inarticulateness; each day of not-writing made me feel more scared. Fortunately, I have, two years ago, been through the Worst and have the reassurance that if I work slowly and wait, something will happen. In spite of my occasional spells of resentment at my own blindness and limitation (I would really like to get something in The New Yorker before I die, I do so admire that particular, polished, rich, brilliant style), I go slowly on, with little flashes of delight, for example, at the sliver of new moon this week outside my window, the sudden gentler blue air today, the sight of a red-cheeked blonde baby—little things; but as Sassoon says so rightly, “The important thing is to love this world; if a man has loved so much as a grapefruit and found it beautiful, God will save him.” The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly managed past.
This term, then, I plan to devote to reading for my supervisions and writing at least two hours every day, no matter what, no matter how bad it comes out. I am starting with these reported descriptions of people and places, trying for precise details, and today did the outline for a version of the Matisse-Cathedral story, which I am going to try in New Yorker style first, then perhaps Ladies’ Home Journal style, and then as a feature article. I want to “lay in” reading and introspection this term and feel that my health should improve with good hours, plenty of fruit and biking, and a developing spiritual calm, which comes as soon as I am writing and sending out things. I would smother if I didn’t write.
I honestly feel that if I work every day, in a few years I will have begun publishing again. Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing. Ironically enough, I write best when I am happy, because I then have that saving sense of objectivity which is humor and artistic perspective. When I am sad, it becomes a one-dimensional diary. So a full, rich life is essential.
Don’t worry that I am a “career woman,” either. I sometimes think that I might get married just to have children if I don’t meet someone in these two years. Mrs. Prouty needn’t worry either, the dear. France gave me perspective on Mallory, who is fine, but so young. I do need to meet older men. These young ones are so fluid, uncertain, tentative, that I become a mother to them. I miss a mature humor and savor and love of career which older men have. I feel that I am certainly ready for that. The only man I have ever really loved (that is, accepting the faults and working with them) is Sasso
on, of course. And I fear for his particular nervous … health when I think of children. Oh, well, so much meandering. But I am definitely meant to be married and have children and a home and write like these women I admire: Mrs. Moore [Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger], Jean Stafford, Hortense Calisher, Phyllis McGinley.
Wish me luck.
Love,
Sivvy
JANUARY 20, 1956
Dearest Grammy and Grampy,
… I am starting a rather more serious and solitary life this term, giving up the very demanding, if stimulating, acting in the theater and writing at least two hours a day … I am building up creativity from the inside out. Even though writing is difficult, often stilted at first, or rough, I firmly believe that if I work hard enough, long enough, some stories rising out of my rapidly growing perspective about people and places may be published. Somehow stories interest me much more now than the narrower, more perfect form of poems.
I can refer with authority now to much of England, France, and America, and the texture of my writing gets richer as I live more fully. I want most of all to be able to publish some of my transformed experiences, to share them with others.
… I am making slow progress in the wide fields of my ignorance, going on with French, reading modern tragedy (Strindberg, now), which is sheer delight, and going to study classical tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), which I have, shockingly enough, never touched.
I can’t believe that in June mother will be sitting here, and the windows will be opened over a spring garden! I am living for spring, really.
I am so sorry to hear you had that miserable gastritis [Grammy was ill now with what turned out to he terminal cancer] and only hope that by the time this letter reaches you, you will be feeling much, much better. Know that I am thinking of you and wishing you healthy and well again.