I felt that after the wailing blast of the last letter, I owed you a quick follow-up to tell you that it is a new day; bright, with sun, and a milder aspect, and my intense physical misery is gone, and with it, my rather profound despair….
I had a complete physical exam last week (having had a chest x-ray) and was pronounced fine, but they suggested that I might see their psychiatrist to fill in the details of my breakdown, and so I would know him in case the stress of completely new circumstances made me feel I wanted to talk to him. Well, I went over to see him this morning and really enjoyed talking to him. He is a pleasant, keen middle-aged man, and I felt a certain relief in telling someone here a little about my past. In a way, it makes me feel a certain continuity. Well, I found myself telling him about my opinions of life and people in Cambridge, and as I went on, I realized that what I miss most is the rich intellectual and emotional contact I had with older people at home and at college. I am literally starved for friends who are older, wiser, rich with experience, to whom I can look up, from whom I can learn.
… I know there are, no doubt, brilliant dons here at Cambridge, and many men who are mature and integrated emotionally and intellectually, but I just haven’t met them. The best ones we get on the lecture platform, but our women supervisors in Newnham are, as I have so often said, bluestocking grotesques, who know about life second-hand. As a woman, my position is probably more difficult, for it seems the Victorian age of emancipation is yet dominant here: there isn’t a woman professor I have that I admire personally! I am not brilliant enough to invade the professors at the men’s colleges (the biggest ones only teach research students, and the dons supervise the men in their own colleges), but there is no medium for the kind of rapport I had at Smith. I realized with a shock this morning that there isn’t one person among my friends here or in Europe who is more mature than I! All the girls and boys I know are younger or barely equal (however brilliant they may be in their subjects), and I am constantly being sister or mother. Only when I am sick, it seems … can I be the dependent one….
I feel that while I am ignorant and untutored in much, I can give some of my native joy of life to older people and balance our relation this way. I also am going to look up that couple whose address Dr. B. gave me. I’ve put it off and off … I really need deep contact with the mellowness and perspective of older people which the orientals do so well to reverence …
Tonight I am going to a party celebrating the publication of a new literary review, which is really a brilliant counteraction to the dead, uneven, poorly written two literary magazines already going here, which run on prejudice and whim … This new one is run by a combination of Americans and Britons, and the poetry is really brilliant, and the prose, taut, reportorial, and expert…. I must admit I feel a certain sense of inferiority, because what I have done so far seems so small, smug and little. I keep telling myself that I have a vivid, vital, good life, and that it is simply that I haven’t learned to be tough and disciplined enough with the form I give it in words which limits me, not the life itself.
… I could never be either a complete scholar or a complete housewife or a complete writer: I must combine a little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all. Although I would like to concentrate on writing in intense spurts when I feel like it…. Do know that I am really happy, and it is not a contradiction to say that at the same time I am debating inwardly with problems. That is just life, and I am ready to take it and wrestle with it to the end of my days. I love you very much, and hope you will understand my present frankness and know that it has made me feel much better just to know that you are listening.
Your own loving Sivvy
SATURDAY MORNING
MARCH 3, 1956
Dearest Mother,
… Already the grounds of Newnham are purple and gold with crocuses and white with snowdrops!
I do want to tell you now how much your letters mean to me. Last Monday those phrases you copied from Max Ehrmann came like milk-and-honey to my weary spirit; I’ve read them again and again. Isn’t it amazing what the power of words can do? I also loved your two letters which came today. I don’t know if you’ve felt how much more mellowed and chastened I’ve become in the last half year, but I certainly have gotten beyond that stage of “not listening” to advice and feel that I have been confiding in you through letters more than ever before in my life and welcome all you think wise to tell me. Perhaps you still don’t realize (why is it we are so much more articulate about our fault-findings than our praises, which we so often take for granted?) how very much I have admired you: for your work, your teaching, your strength and your creation of our exquisite home in Wellesley, and your seeing that Warren and I went to the Best colleges in the United States (best for each of us, respectively, I’m sure of it!). All this is your work, your encouragement, your produce, and as a family, we have weathered the blackest of situations, fighting for growth and new life. Perhaps I most especially admire your resilience and flexibility symbolized by your driving, which seems to open new possibilities for a richer, wider life in many other ways, too. I want you to know all this in words, for while I have been most verbal about all the limits in our lives, I don’t think I’ve ever specifically told you all that I love and revere, and it is a great, great deal!
… I have made a sharp alteration in that radical treatment of men I’ve been giving hitherto … instead of cursing them all for not being Richard … I am casually accepting friends and dates merely for the present companionship and asking for nothing more than human company. I am also being much more generous and kind and tolerant, and taking life easier. There is no reason why I can’t enjoy plays and movies and a little talk with boys who are nice and personable, just because I think I am made for a “great love.”
… Had sherry at Chris Levenson’s Thursday with Stephen Spender and others. When I get a few more recent (and more sociological) poems ready, I’ll send them to his magazine. One thing, British literary circles are so inbred; every writer ends up in London, knowing everything about the work, mistresses and personal idiosyncrasies of everyone else, and talks and analyzes the others continually. Blessed be America for its catholic bigness!
Met, by the way, a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet at the wild St. Botolph’s Review party last week; will probably never see him again (he works for J. Arthur Rank in London), but wrote my best poem about him afterwards—the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with—such is life. [The man was Ted Hughes.] Will send a few poems in my next letter so you can see what I’m doing.
Much, much love,
sivvy
TUESDAY MORNING
MARCH 5, 1956
… The “J—myth” has at last been dealt with, too, thank goodness. The explosion came when she wrote and underlined in pencil all over five new books I’d just loaned her. She evidently felt that since I underlined my own books in black ink, nothing further could damage them. Well, we had a real session, both of us agreeing to get all our troubles out in the open, and I feel much better. Actually, we are too much alike to be friends, and this “overlapping of identity” has bothered us both in different ways: we are both “American girls who write,” with similar humor and used to being “queens” among our men … together we puzzled this odd situation out. Very simply, we will never be at all close (as we might have been in America) ironically, because one of us here is enough in any situation, and both of us dominate social affairs. She admitted that in my presence she suddenly became very clumsy (as I felt obtuse, I suppose) and we came to a positive working agreement which got rid of all suspicion and resentment and makes a healthier “laissez faire” situation. So I go on facing my private dragons and finding a rather powerful satisfaction in wrestling with angels. So don’t worry. I’ll use your coming check for a weekend in London after term is over. Meanwhile, love to all from your own
Sivvy
FRIDAY MORNING
MARCH 9, 1956
Dearest of Mo
thers,
It is a beauteous morning, and I have my windows thrown wide open to let the crisp, clear air and pale sunlight flood into my room. Song sparrows are twittering and chirping in the gutters under my windows, and the orange-tile rooftops are all sparkling in the light, which reminds me so of the chilled champagne air of Vence, Nice and the January Riviera. I felt especially desirous of just hugging you and sharing this lovely morning, so, in substitute, I am writing this letter before I set out to the laundromat and my weekly shopping, and also sending you my two most recent, and, I think, best poems which I have written in the last weeks….
I’ll be so eager to hear what you think of these: for myself, they show a rather encouraging growth. “Channel Crossing” is one of the first I’ve written in a “new line”; turning away from the small, coy love lyric (I am most scornful of the small preciousness of much of my past work) and bringing the larger, social world of other people into my poems. I have been terribly limited hitherto, and my growing strong concepts of the universe have been excluded from my poetry (coming out, I think, most interestingly in my series of Seventeen stories about social problems: Jewish question, sororities, etc., which I still admire!). Now, I am making a shift. The world and the problems of an individual in this particular civilization are going to be forged into my discipline, which is still there, but, if you will read the poem out loud (it’s meant to be), you will, I hope, not be conscious of rhymes and end-stopped lines, but of the conversational quality of the verse.
“The Pursuit” is more in my old style, but larger, influenced a bit by Blake, I think (tiger, tiger), and more powerful than any of my other “metaphysical” poems; read aloud also. It is, of course, a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself; death, here, includes the concept of love, and is larger and richer than mere love, which is part of it. The quotation is from Racine’s Phèdre, where passion as destiny is magnificently expressed. I am hypnotized by this poem and wonder if the simple, seductive beauty of the words will come across to you if you read it slowly and deliberately aloud. Another epigraph could have been from my beloved Yeats: “Whatever flames upon the night, Man’s own resinous heart has fed.” The painter’s brush consumes his dreams, and all that.
Oh, mother, if only you knew how I am forging a soul! How fortunate to have these two years! I am fighting, fighting, and I am making a self, in great pain, often, as for a birth, but it is right that it should be so, and I am being refined in the fires of pain and love. You know, I have loved Richard above and beyond all thought; that boy’s soul is the most furious and saintly I have met in this world; all my conventional doubts about his health, his frail body, his lack of that “athletic” physique which I possess and admire, all pales to nothing at the voice of his soul, which speaks to me in such words as the gods would envy. I shall perhaps read you his last letter when you come.
Well, overcome as he is by an intense, almost Platonic scrupulosity, he feels he must conquer the phenomenal world, serve two years in the Army, find a profession and become self-supporting and then and only then found a home and all the rest. So with all these large things, he leaves me, consecrated to silence, and a kind of abstract understanding in our own particular world of devils and angels. It would be a good thing if someone from this world could overcome his image and win me, but I seriously doubt that, however I seek, I will find someone that strong. And I will settle for nothing less than a great soul; it would be sinful to compromise, when I have known this. I feel like the princess on the glass hill; what possible knight could overcome this image? This dynamic holy soul which we share?
Well, the essence of my difficulty and torment this past term has been to realize that no matter how I wanted to escape the commitment, I cannot deny that I am captive to a powerful love which passes all the surface considerations of this world and reaches to what we can know of the eternal.
… I have changed in my attitudes: I parcel out the love I have, the enormous desire to give (which is my problem, not “being loved” so much: I just have to “give out” and feel smothered when there is no being strong enough for my intensity), in homeopathic doses to those around me: the little woman in the subway lavatory whom I changed from a machine into a person for a minute and hugged her; the crooked man selling malt bread; the little boy running his black dog which urinated over a pool of white swans: and all those around me. I am, essentially, living in two worlds: one, where my love is gone with Richard; the other, this world of books, market, and nice people. If I could meet anyone this summer, or next year, or next, I would be most happy to learn to love again. I am always open to this. But until someone can create worlds with me the way Richard can, I am essentially unavailable.
I hope you understand that all this is very private, and I am sharing it with you as I would the deepest secrets of my soul, because I want you to understand that my battles are intricate and complex, and that I am, without despair, facing them, wrestling with angels, and learning to tolerate that inevitable conflict which is our portion as long as we are truly alive. I am growing strong by practice. All the growing visions of beauty and new world which I am experiencing are paid for by birth pangs. The idea of perfect happiness and adjustment was exploded in Brave New World; what I am fighting for is the strength to claim the “right to be unhappy” together with the joy of creative affirmation….
… More practically … also, more seriously, how is grammy? I heard she was in the hospital again this week and am most concerned to hear how she is coming along. Please do let me count on your coming this June, unless she is in a critical state. In a sense, you have a debt to the young, to the living, and the future, you know. I’d love to be able to think you’d do everything possible to come; I’ve gotten to look so extremely forward to your sharing England with me!
More immediately still: will you please write to the Eugene Saxton Fellowship Fund (of. that book in our library at home on scholarships) and ask for information about applications. I want very seriously to apply for a grant for the years 1957–58 for either writing a book of poems or a novel. I believe that my background of poetry prizes is a rather fine statement of promise: The Academy of American Poets, Lyric Young Poets, sharing the Irene Glascock, Smith prizes and publications. If, as I hope, I can write a good deal this spring and publish, I should be the “young writer” they seem to favor. Also, I feel the sproutings of a novel in me, which would have to be started in the form of short stories; but I am going to revolt from this critical world (which can dry one’s blood, if one isn’t careful; I see it in all the women around me) and want desperately to try spending a year writing, preferably in southern France, Italy or Spain, where the climate is “my air” all year round. I know I probably will have to apply sometime next fall early and want to be prepared with documents, etc.
Please, please, ask them about this in a letter, saying perhaps that your daughter is on a Fulbright. Better still, send me their address and a copy of their paragraph of purpose in the book, and I’ll write—that would be best. I’ve had a new vision, partly because of this brilliant, analytical, critical boy I’ve met from Yale whose mind has clarified certain purposes in me which see dangers in the academic continuity. He’s going back to be a professor at Yale and knows all the brilliant critics: Cleanth Brooks, E. M. Forster, David Daiches, C. S. Lewis, and so on. But the pedestrian, analytic mind, while tonic, appalls me. I fly to the saintly, religious, intuitive: the blend of both: Ivan Karamazov!
Love from a very happy Sivvy
PURSUIT
Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.
—Racine
There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt
hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?
Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body’s bait.
Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?
I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blood;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears: