I finished teaching on May 22 and felt honestly sorry to say goodbye to my girls. I was amused at my last day of classes to get applause in the exact volume of my own feelings toward every class: a spatter at 9, a thunderous ovation at 11 which saw me down two flights of stairs, and a medium burst at 3. Now that it is over, I can’t believe I’ve taught 20 stories, 2 novels, 10 plays, and countless poems, including The Waste Land. But I have. And I’ve done more than I thought or hoped for those first black weeks of teaching which upset me very much: I think I have chosen excellent works, won over my most difficult pupils and taught them a good deal.
On the whole, my colleagues have depressed me: it is disillusioning to find the people you admired as a student are weak and jealous and petty and vain as people, which many of them are. And the faculty gossip, especially among the men, over morning coffee, afternoon tea, and evening cocktails is very boring: all about the latest gossip, possible appointments, firings, grants, students, literary criticism—all secondary, it seems—an airtight, secure community, with those on tenure getting pot-bellies. Writers especially are suspect if they don’t place academic life first, and we have seen one or two of our writing acquaintances given very raw and nasty deals. Of course, we have been at an advantage, both having resigned in face of requests to stay. But it has been impossible for either of us to get any work done, and we feel that if we drifted into this well-paid security, we would curse ourselves in ten years’ time for what might have been.
I am sure, for example, that Ted has the makings of a great poet, and he already has some loyal supporters like Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot, whom we hope to see when we go to England. Ted is better than any poet I can think of ten years his senior, and I feel as a wife the best I can do is demand nothing but that we find workable schemes whereby we both can write and live lives which are dictated by inner needs for creative expansion and experience.
Of course, there are very few people who can understand this. There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don’t have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job. We found this out when trying to establish credit at a local general store. We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of “The Young American Couple”; I had a job, Ted didn’t; we owned no car, were buying no furniture on the installment plan, had no TV, had no charge accounts, came as if literally dropped from foreign parts. The poor secretary was very perplexed. Anyhow, I can talk to you freely about our plans, if not to mother. She worries so that the most we can do is put up an illusion of security—security to us is in ourselves, and no job, or even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work, and hard hard work which is Spartan in many ways. Ted is especially good for me because he doesn’t demand Immediate Success and Publication and is training me not to. We feel the next five years are as important to our writing as medical school is to a prospective surgeon. Ted says simply to produce, work, produce, read not novels or poems only, but books on folklore, fiddler crabs and meteorites—this is what the imagination thrives on. The horror of the academic writer is that he lives on air and other people’s secondhand accounts of other people’s writing …
Well, you see what I mean: the writer is cut off from life and begins to think as he analyzes stories in class—very differently from the way a writer feels reality, which, according to many teachers, is too simple as such and needs symbols, irony, archetypal images and all that. Well, we will try to get along without such conscious and contrived machinery. We write and wake up with symbols on our pages, but do not begin with them….
Ted and I left for New York City immediately after my last papers … Oscar Williams was a queer, birdlike little man, obviously very at-odds since his best friend, Dylan Thomas, and his beloved poet-painter wife, Gene Derwood, died in the same year. He lives in a tiny rooftop studio painted light blue, with a skylight, covered with oil paintings by his wife, bright-colored animals and portraits, photographs of his dead loves, brick homemade bookcases full of poetry books, tables, floors and bathtub covered and full of unwashed glasses, and a fine little tar-roof porch overlooking the gulls and boats and ringed with potted rosebushes and mint plants. He served us Drambuie and we got along well….
… We also visited Babette Deutsch, a … poet and critic, who is married to the Russian scholar Avrahm Yarmolinsky; she’d written in admiration of Ted’s poems. And lunched with Dave Keightley, [a] friend of ours … his publishing company editors, World Pub., are interested in seeing a manuscript of my poetry book (now provisionally titled “Full Fathom Five”) this fall. They’ve never published poetry before, but are interested in “genuine fresh talent,” which I hope I have. I’ve been changing, I think much for the better, in my writing style. Ironically, of the 35 or so poems I’ve published in my career, I’ve rejected about 20 of these from my book manuscript as too romantic, sentimental and frivolous and immature. My main difficulty has been overcoming a clever, too brittle and glossy feminine tone, and I am gradually getting to speak “straight out” and of real experience, not just in metaphorical conceits. I’ll enclose a recent poem which I hope you may like …
One thing which we haven’t told mother for obvious reasons is that Ted applied for a Saxton writing fellowship for this year, and we were sure of getting it for him as Marianne Moore, et al., volunteered to write, and he had a magnificent project for a poetry book. It was the only fellowship, as a Briton, he was eligible for. Ironically, we learned this week that the fellowship is run by trustees from Harper’s and as he is published by them, his project can’t be considered on merit; if it had been so considered, he obviously would have got a grant. So, with supreme and rather distressing irony, the very qualification of his worth, publishing a book, is his one flaw, rendering him ineligible. So I shall apply for the same grant (don’t tell mother about this either), and Ted will apply for a Guggenheim for next year …
God feeds the ravens. I hope you understand this better than mother does. When we are both wealthy and famous, our work will justify our lives, but now our lives and faith must justify themselves. We live very simply and happily and walk each day in Our Park, which is next door and which no one else frequents. There are several brown rabbits, two magnificent black frogs who swim like suave purple-bellied Martians and return our stares for hours, innumerable squirrels, bright yellow birds, red-headed woodpeckers and fruit trees and a garden which is mysteriously replanted as the flowers die: first tulips and daffodils, then hyacinths; then one day we came back to find these gone and beds of geraniums and white petunias in their place. The little rose garden is just coming out, and about once a week we make off with a red or yellow rose.
We met the mad and very nice poet Robert Lowell (the only one, 40-ish, whom we both admire, who comes from the Boston Lowells and is periodically carted off as a manic depressive) when he came to give a reading at the University of Massachusetts. He is quiet, soft-spoken, and we liked him very much. I drove him around Northampton, looking for relics of his ancestors, and to the Historical Society and the graveyard. We hope to see him in Boston when we move down …
Ted and I plan to celebrate our second anniversary at home with mother this Monday, June 16. It seems impossible I’ve been married for two whole years, and much more impossible that I ever wasn’t married to Ted! Oh, we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes, but we feel so perfectly at one with our work and reactions to life and people that we make our own world to work in, which isn’t dependent on anyone else’s love or admiration, but self-contained. Our best pleasure is writing at home, eating and talking and walking in woods to look for animals and birds. Money would be very helpful, but we have everything except this …
Well, I must close now, or I will be typing into tomorrow and next week. Here is a poem [“Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor”] I made about the fiddler crabs we found at Rock Harbor when we went to get mussels last summer for fish bait. I hope you l
ike it. If you find anything inaccurate about the crabs, do tell me about it. Read it aloud for the sounds of it. This is written in what’s known as “syllabic verse,” measuring lines not by heavy and light stresses, but by the number of syllables, which here is 7. I find this form satisfactorily strict (a pattern varying the number of syllables in each line can be set up, as M. Moore does it) and yet it has a speaking illusion of freedom (which the measured stress doesn’t have) as stresses vary freely. Don’t follow my example. Write soon! And I promise to answer.
Much love—
Sivvy
{The following two letters were written on Smith College memorandum paper.}
To: You DATE: JUNE 25,1958
IN RE: ODDS AND ENDS FROM: Me
… VERY GOOD NEWS: In the mail I just got my FIRST acceptance from The New Yorker! And not of a short little poem but of two very fat and amazingly long ones: “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” and “Nocturne,” [published in The New Yorker under the title “Night Walk,” this appeared in The Colossus as “Hardcastle Crags”] the first 91 lines; the last, 45 lines! In our materialistic way, Ted and I figured, amid much jumping up and down, this should mean close to $350, or three full months of Boston rent! For two poems! They wrote a glowing letter, very generous for The New Yorker….
How’s that for a good beginning to a summer of work! You see what happens the minute one worships one’s own god of vocation and doesn’t slight it for grubbing under the illusion of duty to Everybody’s-Way-Of-Life! This is well over three times as much money as I got for half a year of drudgery in correcting exams for the professor of that American Lit. course and well over a month’s salary for a week’s work of pure joy. “The Mussel-Hunters” may not come out till next summer, as they’re very crowded with summer poems, but I should get the check in a few days. What a nice anniversary gift for our coming to America!
x x x Sivvy
You see—the gypsy fortune teller with her card depicting the mailman was very right!
To: You DATE: JULY 25, 1958
IN RE: BITS & PIECES FROM: Me
… I am becoming more and more desirous of being an amateur naturalist. Do you remember if we have any little books on recognizing wild flowers, birds, or animals in Northern America? I am reading some Penguin books about “Man and the Vertebrates” and “The Personality of Animals” and also the delightful book The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson. Ted’s reading her Under the Sea Wind, which he says is also fine. Do read these if you haven’t already; they are poetically written and magnificently informative. I am going back to the ocean as my poetic heritage and hope to revisit all the places I remember in Winthrop with Ted this summer; Johnson Avenue, a certain meadow on it, our beach and grammy’s. Even rundown as it now is, the town has the exciting appeal of my childhood, and I am writing some good poems about it, I think. I’ll enclose that poem “Night-Walk,” the other one The New Yorker accepted, which I think you’ve read…. In the years of our marriage, writing only a total of a few weeks, Ted and I have made about $2,000 (not counting The New Yorker money, which we are beginning our third year with).
We did our Ouija board for the first time in America, and it was magnificent fun—responsive, humorous, and very helpful. It seems to have grown up and claims it is quite happy in America, that it likes “life in freedom,” that it uses its freedom for “making poems,” that poetry is made better by “practice.” Thinking we might make use of it, we asked him (Pan is his signature) for poem subjects (this is always the problem: a good poem needs a good “deep” subject). Pan told me to write about “Lorelei.” When asked, “Why the Lorelei,” he said they were my “own kin.” I was quite amazed. This had never occurred to me consciously as a subject, and it seemed a good one: the Germanic legend background, the water images, the death-wish, and so on. So the next day I began a poem about them, and Pan was right; it is one of my favorites. What is that lovely song you used to play on the piano and sing to us about the Lorelei? …
I hope Warren will be agreeable to exchanging a dinner at our place about once a week for an hour or two of German reading out loud. I am painfully beginning to review my German again by reading one by one the Grimm’s Fairy Tales in that handsome book you gave me, which I just love, and making vocabulary lists from each tale, trying to review one grammar lesson a day. I suppose as one grows older one has a desire to learn all about one’s roots, family, and country. I feel extremely moved by memories of my Austrian and German background and also my ocean-childhood, which is probably the foundation of my consciousness …
The Ouija board also told Ted to write about “Otters,” so he is doing so, and the beginnings sound quite good. Pan claims his family god, “kolossus,” tells him much of his information….
Well, that’s all the news for now. Try to get to the Aldriches next week and call us again. I get up about seven each morning now as it’s cooler … Ted also sends love—
Sylvia
JULY 9, 1958
Dear Warren,
… I haven’t been out in the sun at all this summer—the first time in my life I’m not tan, but have been working hard at poems for my book. I’ve discarded all that I wrote before two years ago and am tempted to publish a book of juvenilia under a pseudonym as about 20 published poems have been ditched. I hope to get my poetry book together in early September or October and send it the round of publishers this winter. It should be a good collection. I feel I’ve got rid of most of my old rigidity and glassy glossiness and am well on the way to writing about the real world, its animals, people, and scenery.
Ted and I are recovering from a sad and traumatic experience. We picked up a baby bird that looked in its last death throes, fallen from a tree, and brought it home. We had it for a week, feeding it raw ground steak, worms, milk (probably a very bad diet), and got enormously fond of the plucky little thing, which looked like a baby starling, with funny furry eyebrows. But when it ran, it fell, and looked to be badly injured. Its leg stiffened then (its pelvis must have been broken, or something), and it sickened, choking and pathetically chirping. We couldn’t sleep or write for days, nursing it and hunting vainly for worms, identifying with it until it became gruesome. Finally, we figured it would be [a] mercy to put it out of its misery, so we gassed it in a little box. It went to sleep very quietly. But it was a shattering experience. Such a plucky little bit of bird. I can’t forget it …
x x x Sivvy
{Written on Smith College memorandum paper.}
To: Mummy DATE: AUGUST 1, 1958
IN RE: ODDS & ENDS FROM: Sivvy
… I have thought much and wouldn’t have Ted change his citizenship for the world. It is part of his identity, I feel, and will always be so.
I’ve thought very carefully about that Stenotype folder … I would be only interested in learning how to Stenotype if I could learn very quickly and start work this winter so it would do me some good. Thus I’d be interested in hearing about the hours, practice time, and span of learning needed for the daily course. Perhaps you could find out these things for me. I would enjoy having a practical skill that would take me into jobs “above average” or “queer,” not just business routine. My appearance and education should help me if I had the practical skill. BUT if I should get this Saxton grant for writing, I would have to give up the idea. I probably won’t get the grant (which would pay for ten months’ writing) and thus would like to have the facts about Stenotyping lined up. How heavy is the machine? Is the roll of tape expensive? I particularly want to get into court reporting. That’s what I’d like to work for. Would I need any other kind of experience? Would I be hired over people with shorthand? Could you investigate this? The two main things: how long to learn the fastest way? Could I get into court reporting and other jobs equivalently interesting? [A mutual friend helped Sylvia by lending her Speedwriting books, which Sylvia mastered on her own. She made use of that skill along with her fast, accurate typing by working periodically throughout 1958–59 at the Massachusetts
General Hospital, writing up case histories of patients.]
Love, Sivvy
The following is from a page of my diary, Sunday, August 3, 1958. Ted, Sylvia, and I had visited the home of Ruth Freeman Geissler (Sylvia had been maid of honor at Ruth’s wedding in 1955).
We visited Ruth on Thursday. She had come home with her five-day-old son, a wee, red-faced infant. Her two daughters were entrancing, especially the lively two-year-old, who immediately captured Ted, enslaving him for the duration of our visit.
I thought the golden, curly-haired one-year-old, a Cover-Girl baby, would attract Sivvy most; but, no, it was the newest one, the wizened little boy (believe I felt Ted withdraw from him—a very young baby can be so raw and weird looking). Sylvia, however, opened the curled hand and stretched out the exquisitely finished little fingers; examined the wrinkled petal of a foot—each toe a dot, yet complete with a speck of pearly nail—the whole foot shorter than the length of her little finger. There was such warmth, such yearning in Sivvy’s face, my heart ached for her. I’d love to be a fairy godmother, to wave a wand and say, “Here, my darling, is a little house; here is a good woman to help you each morning. Now have your baby; spend your mornings writing, then belong to your family the rest of the time,”
In early July 1959 Ted and Sylvia set out on the cross-country tour.
YELLOWSTONE PARK, MONTANA
JULY 29, 1959
Dear Mother and Warren,
… At the blue moonlit hour of quarter of three, I was wakened from a dream where the car blew to pieces with a great rending crash [and] by a very similar crash and falling jangle. My immediate thought was that a bear had with one cuff demolished the car and was eating the engine out. I woke Ted and we lay for a few moments, listening to the unique sounds of a bear rooting through our belongings. Grunts, snuffles, clattering can lids. We thought he might have somehow broken off the trunk door and got into our tinned supplies, divining food by a seventh sense. Then there was a bumpity, falling noise as the bear bowled a tin past our tent, and I sat up quaking to peer out the tent screen.