Ted, at last, is writing wonderful poems again. He’s gone through a dry spell and been unhappy with his bad luck about his leg, his missing driving lessons, his not being able to get a job (there’s no work there at all, really!), and his feeling of isolation. Now, after Thanksgiving vacation (which seemed to break the jinx of depression on us and get us rested and refreshed, thanks to your luxurious treatment), he’s just turned out six beautiful poems, which give me at least a vicarious pleasure, and a delightful short fairy story.
I am so lucky to be married to Ted: we read poems aloud and discuss people and magic and everything, always interested and happy when not tired. If only we can get into our stride, our own writing life, then no weariness or worry will get at the deep part of us. I feel terribly vulnerable and “not-myself” when I’m not writing and now know I can never combine teaching and writing, nor can Ted. So, only six more months!
Evidently I’m not alone in feeling exhausted about teaching! It seems to take much more out of the women than out of the men. Probably the men get a certain physical satisfaction out of teaching the opposite sex. Some of the old-maid women teachers treat the girls like daughters, but they all get tired. Marie Boroff … said she felt “great psychic exhaustion” with her two jobs, and that there was absolutely not energy left after a teaching day for creative work. Old Miss Williams, another teacher, told me the same thing yesterday about her exhaustion after office hours. These people, however, can bear the tiredness because teaching is their Vocation, but it’s not mine, even though I could be a good one if I had the scholarship and inclination to work with other writers’ work and not produce my own. But it relieves me to think that even the seasoned ones have the same problems I do, doubts, etc….
I must close now, so want to say how happy we’ll be to see you in only two weeks. We are eating royally and are caught up on sleep. So don’t you worry.
Much, much love also to grampy, Dot and Joe, and Bobby and Nancy.
Love,
Your own Sivvy
Sylvia and Ted arrived in Wellesley five days ahead of schedule; I had just returned home from a week’s convalescence at my sister’s house. Ted was still limping badly, having but recently recovered from the broken bone in his foot. Sylvia was rosy—we thought from the cold wind—and evidently delighted to be home.
After a few minutes’ conversation, however, I realized this early arrival had a purpose behind it other than just our mutual pleasure. I placed my hand on Sylvia’s forehead in the old maternal gesture; it was burning hot, so I took her temperature. (No protest on her part, which was unusual.) It was well over 102°, and Ted admitted that she had been feeling poorly for several days to the point where he had become very concerned about her condition. I immediately called our family physician and had Sylvia in bed before the doctor arrived. It was viral pneumonia plus physical exhaustion, and he started her on antibiotics.
Despite all our physical disabilities, by Christmas Eve a little tree was trimmed, and we enjoyed a quiet celebration and the comfort of being together.
MONDAY NIGHT
JANUARY 13, 1958
Dearest Mother,
I suppose the two of us have had rather rough weeks. I managed my full amount of classes and a faculty meeting last week, but it really took a lot of energy out of me as I had no reserve of voltage to spare. Also, I had to prepare my work for the next day every night, so by the time Saturday came, I was really beat. But we slept till noon on Sunday, which was a lovely, icy blue day, and went for a 5-mile walk which cheered us no end. I am still inclined to be rather depressed, a kind of backwash of convalescence from the pneumonia, I guess, but should have a chance to rest up after this week while preparing for the second semester before the exams come in….
I recently had a two-hour talk with one of my worst problem children, a girl who refused to talk in class and objected to being called on. She came in prepared to be very much on the defensive (she would whisper in class and make fun of other girls), but we got along immediately. I was very proud of my psychology, and I think she left feeling excellently treated, although I told her several unpleasant things, such as that she had chosen to get an E in classwork and that I’d like her to move into another section. Selfishly, I just wanted to get rid of her as she distracted the other girls, but I made a completely different point of it. We had also a good talk on religion and the course books, and I felt, ironically enough, that she was a kindred spirit of sorts. She wanted, ironically also, to stay in my class, but I managed to get around that, too.
I do feel I am building up a pretty good relation with most of my students and am feeling some rather well-placed conceit as one of the more favored of the freshman English teachers. They are really good girls….
Do drop us a line when you can. Keep well and don’t take on any extra work too soon.
x x x sivvy
JANUARY 20, 1958
Dearest Mother,
… Ted hasn’t heard yet whether he’ll be teaching half time or full time. We rather hope it’s full time now. His classes begin in ten days, so I hope we’ll find out soon. One of his scheduled books is Crime and Punishment, and I’ve just finished two weeks of lectures on it, so he can use my notes. Very convenient …
Saturday night we drove over to meet some people on the University of Massachusetts faculty. Very different people. Somehow pathetic, wistful, or just pedantic and cranky. At least Ted was relieved, and the prospect of work doesn’t worry him now, as these people are hardly genii … Anyhow, he has some really good books to teach and the recommendation will be very helpful in teaching jobs in Europe.
… Halfway through! And my whole attitude to teaching is changed. Simply knowing that I’m leaving in June has freed me to enjoy it and have a casual attitude, which is evidently catching in a good way. My three o’clock class, in particular, is more enjoyable, and I have a good feeling of general class sympathy, with the exception, of course, of a few bored or stubborn ones. If I can just get ahead of myself in preparation, things should ease up. But how I long to get at writing. To break into the pain of beginning again and get over the hump into something rich—my old life of poems and stories and articles, so once again I can look for the mails with some reason for eagerness.
Perhaps Monday, March 31, and Tuesday, April 1, Ted and I can come down to look at houses or apartments on Beacon Hill. We could move in on the first of June, I think, or the first of July, if necessary … We want to know Boston like the back of our hand before we’re through.
… Dò write.
Much love,
Sivvy
FEBRUARY 16, 1958
Dear Warren,
… I have received a letter from a New York magazine, Art News, offering me from $50 to $75 for a poem on a work of art, so I’m hoping to go to the Art Museum and meditate on Gauguin and Rousseau and produce something this week—it’s so tantalizing to have the outright assignment, I just hope I’m not all dried up …
x x x S.
{Written on Smith College memorandum paper}
DATE: MARCH 22, 1958
From: Sivvy
To: Mother
Just a note to say that I have at last burst into a spell of writing. I was rather stunned Thursday morning, my first real day off after a week of correcting 70 papers, averaging midterm grades and writing a report on another senior thesis, but I had about seven or eight paintings and etchings I wanted to write on as poem-subjects and bang! After the first one, “Virgin in a Tree,” after an early etching by Paul Klee, I ripped into another, probably the biggest and best poem I’ve ever written, on a magnificent etching by Klee titled “Perseus, or the Triumph of Wit over Suffering.” A total of about 90 lines written in one day.
Friday went just as well: with a little lyric fantasy on a lovely painting by Klee on the comic opera The Seafarer, a long and big one on his painting “The Departure of the Ghost,” and a little lyric on a cat with a bird-stigma between its eyebrows, a really mammoth magic cat-head. Th
ese are easily the best poems I’ve written and open up new material and a new voice. I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee, and De Chirico. I have got out piles of wonderful books from the Art Library (suggested by this fine Modern Art Course I’m auditing each week) and am overflowing with ideas and inspirations, as if I’ve been bottling up a geyser for a year. Once I start writing, it comes and comes.
I am enclosing two of the poems … sending the two poems on the etchings to the sumptuous illustrated magazine, Art News, which asked me to write one or several poems for their series of poems on art …
Today I had a reaction, feeling miserable and exhausted with my period and drugging myself to a stupor with aspirin for lack of anything stronger. But after chicken broth, I revived and am looking forward to writing another 90 lines tomorrow. If I can write, I don’t care what happens. I feel like an idiot who has been obediently digging up pieces of coal in an immense mine and has just realized that there is no need to do this, but that one can fly all day and night on great wings in clear blue air through brightly colored magic and weird worlds. Even used the dregs of my inspiration to write about six of those Dole Pineapple Jingles! We could use a car, or $5, or $15,000!
Hope you like these little poems.
Love,
Sivvy
BATTLE-SCENE ROM THE COMIC OPERATIC FANTASY
The Seafarer
It beguiles—
This little Odyssey
In pink and lavender
Over a surface of gently
Graded turquoise tiles
That represent a sea
With chequered waves and gaily
Bear up the seafarer
Gaily, gaily
In his pink plume and armor.
A fairy tale
Gondola of paper
Ferries the fishpond Sinbad
Who poises his pastel spear
Toward three pinky-purple
Monsters which uprear
Off the ocean floor
With fanged and dreadful head.
Beware, beware
The whale, the shark, the squid.
But fins and scales
Of each scrolled sea-beast
Troll no slime, no weed.
They are polished for the joust,
They gleam like Easter-eggshells,
Rose and amethyst.
Ahab, fulfill your boast:
Bring home each storied head.
One thrust, one thrust,
One thrust: and they are dead.
So fables go.
And so all children sing
Their bathtub battles deep,
Hazardous and long,
But oh, sage grownups know
Sea-dragon for sofa, fang
For pasteboard, and siren-song
For fever in a sleep.
Laughing, laughing
Of greybeards wakes us up.
DEPARTURE OF THE GHOST
(After Paul Klee)
Enter the chilly no-man’s land of precisely
Five o’clock in the morning, the no-color void
Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot
Of sulphurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums
Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much,
Gets ready to face the ready-made creation
Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets.
This is the kingdom of the fading apparition,
The oracular ghost who dwindles on pin-legs
To a knot of laundry, with a classic bunch of sheets
Upraised, as a hand, emblematic of farewell.
At this joint between two worlds and two entirely
Incompatible modes of time, the raw material
Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus
Of ambrosial revelation. And so departs.
But as chair and bureau are the hieroglyphs
Of some godly utterance wakened heads ignore,
So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing,
Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld,
A world we lose by merely waking up
Into sanity: the common ghost’s crowed out,
Worms riddling its tongue, or walks for Hamlet
All day on the printed page, or bodies itself
For dowagers in drafty castles at twelve,
Or inhabits the crystal of the sick man’s eye—
Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost
Fringe of mundane vision. But this ghost goes,
Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down
Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,
But toward the point where our thick atmosphere
Diminishes, and god knows what is there:
A point of exclamation marks that sky
In ringing orange like a stellar carrot;
Its round period, displaced and green,
Suspends beside it the first point, the starting
Point of Eden, next the new moon’s curve.
Go, ghost of our mother and father, ghost of us,
And ghost of our dreams’ children, in those sheets
Which signify our origin and end,
To the cloud-cuckoo land of color wheels
And pristine alphabets and cows that moo
And moo as they jump over moons as new
As that crisp cusp toward which you voyage now.
Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye. O keeper
Of the profane grail, the dreaming skull.
APRIL 22, 1958
Dearest Warren,
… In spite of the appalling weather, Ted had a loyal audience [for a poetry reading at Harvard University]—among them … dear Mrs. Prouty (who said in loud, clear tones: “Isn’t Ted wonderful!”). He was—a very good hour of poems, old and new—talk in between.
I met the young poet Philip Booth (who just received a Guggenheim), and we had a lovely dinner at Felicia’s Café near Hanover (?) Street with Jack Sweeney (whom we dearly love—he remembers your A’s in some humanities course) and his lovely Irish wife and (at last) Adrienne Cecile Rich and her husband (she’s the girl whose poetry I’ve followed from her first publication). The excitement tolled the end of my cold, and I feel much better …
Do try to look up Ted’s beautiful, blonde sister in Paris. She is golden-eyed, golden-haired and very delicate and tall as I am—looks about 18, although 28. She works for NATO …
Love,
Sivvy
TUESDAY
JUNE 10, 1958
Dearest Mother,
… We were very tired but managed an amazing lot of fun, meetings, and walking for miles in our five days [in New York]. We just caught Ted’s two publishers before they sailed and had a posh pink-table-clothed dinner with them at the Biltmore…. Went to two parties … one, a rich Fifth Avenue party where we rode up in the elevator with Lionel and Diana Trilling. The place was full of publishers, editors and Columbia professors; the novelist Ralph Ellison; old Farrar of Farrar, Straus, Cudahy; the editor of the Hudson Review, and suchlike. Then a late and sumptuous buffet at the home of Hy Sobiloff, owner of Sloane’s Fifth Avenue Furniture Store, and very dull, wealthy business people, but a fine negro cook whose food and artistry in table arrangement of cakes, strawberries and melons we praised to her pleasure….
I didn’t tell anybody, but I thought you’d be amused at the coincidence that dogs my steps: coming down in the subway afterwards, I almost ran into Dick Wertz, Nancy Hunter’s old flame, who was at Cambridge when I was and is marrying a Smith girl from my class who is teaching with me this year. I was about to speak to him, as his back was turned to me, when, talking to him, I saw Richard Sassoon. I kept quiet and passed by and probably only I of all the five people knew about it. Of all the people in NYC!
We walked miles, lunched with our editor friend at World Publishing Company, and the
y are still interested in seeing my poetry book as it is early this fall. We strolled through Central Park, Harlem, Fifth Avenue and took Ted up to the top of the Empire State Building and had my fortune told by a subway gypsy whose card, ironically enough, showed a picture of a mailman and said I’d get a wonderful letter soon that would change my life for the better.
We saw the Bowery “bums” and the Harlem negroes and the Fifth Avenue tycoons, and, best of all, Marianne Moore, who was lovely at her home in Brooklyn and admires Ted very much and served us strawberries, sesame-seed biscuits and milk and talked a blue streak. Can we reserve tickets and take you to see her this Sunday? Our last night after Marianne Moore was lovely, too: two experimental Ionesco plays and a good dinner in the Village.
We hope to come home for supper Thursday. My reading-recording is Friday afternoon, and we’ll go to dinner with Jack Sweeney that night. Mrs. Prouty has asked us (Ted and me) for dinner Sunday noon, but I thought maybe you and grampy and Ted and I could have a special dinner Monday the 16th to celebrate our second anniversary. How about it? And then we must return to Hamp and get to work …
Much love,
Sivvy
JUNE 11, 1958
Dearest Warren,
… I realize, as I start to write, how many letters I’ve written you in my head and how much I’ve missed you. There are so very few people in the world I really care about, and I guess you and Ted are the closest of all. Perhaps we can go for picnic and swim at the Cape to celebrate your return. I want so much, over the course of the next year, when I hope we’ll be very close and you coming over to dinner often (we’re going to look for a Boston apartment this weekend) and visiting us much, to hear, bit by bit, about your ideas and experiences in Europe and of your work at Harvard. You know I’ve always had a secret desire to go to Harvard, and the next best thing is your going. I have that horrid habit mothers get of being secretly determined all my sons will go to Harvard.