There in the blue weird light of the moon, not 10 feet away, a huge, dark bear-shape hunched, guzzling at a tin. I found in the morning that it was the black-and-gilt figured cookie tin we took the date-nut bars in; it had been in the back seat of the car in my red bag, shut, full of Ritz crackers and Hydrox cookies, and some postcards. The bear must have lifted out the bag after smashing the window, rolled the can about till the lid came off, undone the wax paper and eaten every last crumb. I found the postcards the next day, lying among the rubble, the top card of moose antlers turned down and face-up the card of a large bear with an actual bear paw-print on it.
We lay there for what seemed years, wondering if the bear would eat us, since it found our crackers so interesting. Just as we were relaxing and felt the dawn starting to lighten, we heard a heavy shuffling tread. The bear, back from its rounds, had returned to the car. Ted stood up to look out the back window—it was all I could do to keep him from going out before to check on the damage—and reported that the bear was at the back of the car, halfway in the left rear window. It had discovered our oranges. From then until sunup, we lay listening to the bear squeeze the oranges open and slurp up the juice. It was interrupted only by a car which drove by and scared the bear to run toward the front door of our tent. It tripped on the guy ropes anchoring our porch and for a moment the whole tent shook so we thought it had decided to come in. Then there was a long silence. Then more orange-squeezing. We got up, rather shaken. The car window had been shattered to the root, and wiry brown bear hairs stuck all along the edge of it.
Amazingly, the story got around camp. An old regular came up to advise us that bears hated kerosene and to smear all our window frames with that. Another said bears hated red pepper. Well, we felt we had the daylight hours to build a fortress against our enemy, who would indubitably return. So we moved some sites up, which cheered us. Then we packed everything of value and all food in the trunk. We reported the accident to the ranger, who recorded it, so it’s there if the insurance people need it, and he was very noncommittal.
I mentioned the incident to a woman up early in the lavatory, and she seemed very disquieted by my report of the broken window. It turned out she had just moved from West Thumb, another camp, where a woman had been killed by a bear Sunday, the night we came. That woman, hearing the bear at her food at night, had gone out with a flashlight to shoo it away, and it turned on her and downed her with one vicious cuff. Naturally, the story was hushed up by the rangers, but this woman who had been “sleeping under the stars” with her husband felt concerned, especially since a bear growled them into flight when they hesitated about sharing their breakfast with it.
Well, this story put proper concern into us, too. By twilight we had the car kerosened, flung red pepper everywhere, sprayed Fly-Ded all about, drank Ovaltine and took a tranquilizer each—which I had been saving for the Donner Pass—and went to bed at 9 p.m. to the usual shouts, “There it is,” “Up there, a bear!” That night everybody banged the bear away with pans, for they run at noise; our story had got around. We slept the sleep of the blessed, and the bear did not touch our kerosene-soaked poncho sealing the broken window….
Well, we are fine and both of us tanned and having the experience of our lives. We hope to try some deep-sea fishing if we can …
Love to you both and to Sappho [their cat].
Sivvy and Ted
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 1959
Dear Mother,
… PLEASE don’t worry about my poetry book, but send it off. I know about summer editors, but want to send it to as many places as I can. I also have gone over it very carefully and am not going to try to change it to fit some vague, abstract criticism. If an editor wants to accept it and make a few changes, then, all right. You need to develop a little of our callousness and brazenness to be a proper sender-out of manuscripts. I have a good list of publishers and haven’t begun to eat into it. The biggest places are often best because they can afford to publish a few new people each year….
Sylvia and catch, summer 1959
Aunt Frieda [her father’s sister] had a wonderful cold chicken lunch, string beans, potato salad, tomato and lettuce salad, hot rolls, fresh pineapple, coffee cake and tea ready for us yesterday when we came. Both she and Uncle Walter are handsome, fun, and so young in spirit. They have a little green Eden of a house, surrounded by pink and red and white oleander bushes, with two avocado trees loaded down with (alas) not-yet-ripe fruit, a peach tree, a guava tree, a persimmon tree, a fig tree and others.
Aunt Frieda has had some wonderful adventures and is a great storyteller. Ted gets on magnificently with Walter; we simply love them both. It is amazing how Frieda resembles daddy—the same clear, piercing, intelligent bright blue eyes and shape of face. Ted and I plan to be home about the 28th or maybe even before if we have no setbacks. Love to you, Warren, and Sappho.
Sivvy
Sylvia and Ted returned home according to schedule, both looking very tan and well. Nevertheless, I sensed a great weariness in Sylvia; at times, a tremulous quality as she spoke of the two-month stay they were planning in the writers’ colony at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, and the return to England—this time to make their home there—which would take place in mid-December. Was it her old “homesickness-just-before-leaving-home” or something more? I felt it was a combination of both, and so it proved to be, for Sylvia had become pregnant just before she and Ted started their cross-country trip.
However, as she told me two months later, she was not sure she was pregnant until she had arrived at Yaddo. She wanted this pregnancy; she had seen a gynecologist in the spring and had “her tubes blown out,” as she put it.
She made no allowances for herself during these beginning months, but packed and unpacked and packed again, and pushed herself to write each day. It was not until her return to Wellesley from Yaddo, when she was five months along in her pregnancy, that she had a medical checkup.
I think the interim at Yaddo was very good for her; she had no responsibility in regard to meals or housework; she could do what she enjoyed most—write. Even though the very privilege of being a “guest” there made her feel a sort of compulsion to be creative—which was at times frustrating in itself, building up a feeling of guilt if she did not produce each day—some good poems did emerge (most of them appeared in her first book, The Colossus) during the stay there, and she looked back upon it as an oasis in a year of change.
YADDO
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER 10, 1959
To: Warren and Mother FROM: Me
IN RE: OUR ARRIVAL
… I am sitting in my “studio” on the third (top) floor of West House (where, on the first floor, we have our large bedroom, bathroom and closet—the combination about twice as big as our Boston apartment). The house is lovely, all nooks and angles, with several studios in it. The libraries and living rooms and music rooms are like those in a castle, all old plush, curios, leather bindings, oil paintings on the walls, dark woodwork, carvings on all the furniture. Very quiet and sumptuous.
I am the only person on the top floor, and my study is low-ceilinged, painted white, with a cot, a rug, a huge, heavy dark-wood table that I use as a typing and writing table with piles of room for papers and books. It has a skylight and four windows on the east side that open out onto a little porch looking over gables and into tall, dense, green pines. The only sound is from the birds, and, at night, the distant dreamlike calling of the announcer at the Saratoga racetrack.
I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about seven hours a day.
Ted has a marvelous studio out in the woods, a regular little house to himself, all glassed in and surrounded by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, a cot, and huge desk. I am so happy we can work apart, for that is what we’ve really needed.
The food so far seems to be very good. Two cups of fine coffee for breakfast a coffee
roll, eggs done to order, toast, jam, orange juice, served in a great dining room. We can eat any time from eight to nine. Then we pick up box lunches, two little thermoses with milk and coffee, so we won’t be interrupted all day, and go off to work. Usually in the summer there are about 30 people here, but now there are only about 10 or 12, mostly artists and composers (who seem very nice) and a couple of poets we have never heard of. A magazine room has all the reviews we like and the British magazines. There seem to be lakes full of bass, a famous rose garden, and long wood-walks, all of which we look forward to exploring….
… One thing: I would like some information about Austria, especially the Tyrol, for something I’m working on and would love it if you’d write me a descriptive letter about those places you visited—materials of the houses, furnishings, how old-fashioned are they? Sort of stove, animals, colors and types of scenery, occupations, how children help with chores—little colored details like that—the clothes they wear and so on.
Do write us.
Love,
Sivvy
SEPTEMBER 23, 1959
Dear Mother,
… I read some of my poems here the other night with a professor from the University of Chicago who read from a novel-in-progress. Several people are leaving today, among them a very fine young Chinese composer of whom we are very fond, on his second Guggenheim this year. Women come here, I learned, who have families. They leave their children in camp or with relatives: a great rest for them.
We get on well with the director and her secretary, and she wrote a little note that she hopes we come again before long for an even longer stay. So it is pleasant, indeed, to feel that this place will always be open to us. I imagine the MacDowell Colony will be, too, since they sent us their application blanks, but this is obviously the finest of the three such institutions in America. I particularly love the scenic beauty of the estate: the rose gardens, goldfish pools, marble statuary everywhere, woodland walks, little lakes. Ted and I took out the estate rowboat in a very weedy little lake and caught a bass apiece Sunday, about ¾ A of a pound each—enough for a lunch; yet we threw them back. The food here is so fine we had no real need of fish to eat.
We had severe cold here, with frosts, but now it is warm enough to walk coatless again. We miss Sappho. We feed some of our milk to a white-pawed tiger cat here that jumped out at us from the woods, but no cat can compare to Sappho’s delicacy and breeding.
Wish you might drive up here to spend an afternoon with us.
With love to you and Warren—
Sivvy
OCTOBER 7, 1959
To Mother and Warren,
Thanks for your good letter … We really don’t have any news—our life here is so secluded. We simply eat breakfast, go to our respective studios with a picnic lunch and write, read, and study, then have tea, chat a bit, have dinner and read before bed….
Ted has finished his play—a symbolic drama based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, only set in a modern industrial community under a paternalistic ruler. I hope the Poets’ Theater will give it at least a reading. We have yet to type it.
I do rather miss Boston and don’t think I could ever settle for living far from a big city full of museums and theaters. Now Mrs. Ames, the elderly Mother of Yaddo, has left for Europe, there are only her poetess secretary Polly, a very nice woman, two painters and a composer on a Guggenheim here. From what we hear, certain artists live on these colonies almost all year, spending four months in the winter at Yaddo, then moving on to the MacDowell Colony. I could never do that myself—too much like living in a vacuum. But it is nice to know that practically any time we could invite ourselves back here … Ted loves it and is getting a lot of work done….
Lots of love to you both—
Sivvy
OCTOBER 13, 1959
To Mummy and Warren,
Greetings! As usual our main news is that we are well fed. Every dinner seems bound to outdo the last … After a week of solid, steaming rain, we are at last having crisp, clear weather—the Green Mountains blue in the distance, the newly fallen pine needles a resilient carpet underfoot.
Ted’s proofs for his Harper’s story [“The Rain Horse”] have come—very exciting, and it reads marvelously. It will have black-and-white drawings with it, I gather. Tentatively, it is scheduled for the December issue. We are very proud of it … I hope I can hypnotize… him to finish up one or two others.
The New Yorker, at last, bought the poem you sent me, “A Winter’s Tale,” for their December 26th issue, which is pleasant. There is a lot more competition for special seasonal occasions like that, and I wrote the poem as a light piece after that pleasant walk you and Warren and Ted and I took last Christmas time around Beacon Hill….
Am very painstakingly studying German two hours a day: a few grammar lessons, then translating a Goethe lyric or a page or two from the Kafka stories Warren brought me from Germany—listing all the vocabulary and learning it. Hope to speed up after a few weeks at it.
Do write!
Much love,
S.
OCTOBER 28, 1959
Dear Mother,
… I am growing very pleased with the idea of living in England. The speed and expense of America is just about 50 years ahead of me. I could be as fond of London as of any other city in the world, and plays, books, and all these things are so much more within one’s means. Travel, too. You must never take a ship again, but fly over to visit us.
Last night Polly, the very sweet woman from Brookline (a cousin of Wallace Fowlie) … had two bottles of vin rosé for dinner and a birthday cake with candles in honor of my day, which touched me very much.
I want Ted to take me on a trip around England, especially to Wales and to little fishing villages. When you come, we should go on a jaunt of some sort, staying at old inns and taking country walks.
Much love,
Sivvy
Sylvia and Ted returned to our Wellesley home just before Thanksgiving—Sylvia very noticeably pregnant.
Ted worked away in the upstairs bedroom, while Sylvia sorted and packed the huge trunk which we had set up in the breezeway. There were painful choices to make—what to take, what to leave behind. This was really leaving home—apartment hunting in London lay ahead, as well as making arrangements for the baby, due at the end of March.
On the day they left, Sylvia was wearing her hair in a long braid down her back with a little red wool cap on her head, and looked like a high school student.
As the train pulled out, Ted called, “We’ll be back in two years!”
PART SIX
December 13, 1959–August 25, 1961
With the help of friends, Sylvia and Ted found a tiny third-floor flat in London near Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park.
In February I960, Sylvia signed a contract for her first volume, The Colossus and Other Poems. The haunting memories of emotional terror voiced in some of the poems were in direct contrast to the strong, affirmative voice she gave forth in her letters and conversations with her family.
When, on April 1, 1960, Sylvia gave birth at home to Frieda Rebecca she was attended only by an Indian midwife. The joyous advent of her little daughter touched off another spate of writing. By now Ted had the use of a friend’s study where he could work in quiet, and Sylvia worked there, too, drafting The Bell Jar—unknown to me. In their writing, they stimulated and supported each other: after all their hard work, the harvest was just beginning.
In the winter of 1961 Sylvia had to undergo an appendectomy and soon after suffered a miscarriage.
In July 1961 I visited them, staying with Frieda while Sylvia and Ted went on a holiday to France. Before I left for the States, they had decided to purchase an old rectory in Devon. Sylvia was again pregnant, and they were longing to establish a home of their own.
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
[TED’S HOME]
DECEMBER 26, 1959
Dearest Mother,
I am sitting, about to go to bed,
in the little second parlor downstairs by a roaring coal fire with the rain swatting against the triple window in front of me, very comfortable, after a light supper of creamed turkey and mushrooms on toast I made. Olwyn is out for dinner; Ted’s parents are dozing in the front parlor after admiring the lovely book on America you sent them (you couldn’t have chosen better), and Ted is upstairs in our bedroom at his desk …
It scarcely seems possible we have been here two weeks. I have spent most of my time typing some things for Ted and the new manuscript of my poetry book (about 86 pages). It has rained and blown almost constantly (reread Ted’s poem “Wind”; it’s perfect), but we have gone out for brief walks. Now we are pretty much rested up and in very good health. Next Sunday … we go to London to stay a few days, as long as we need, to locate a good, comfortable apartment within easy walking distance of a big park, shops, a laundromat, etc., in Central London. We look forward to the trip and hope to spend our evenings going to plays. We have had tea at each of Ted’s relatives: an Aunt Hilda and an Uncle Walter (the wealthy one), and taught Ted’s sister and Hilda’s daughter Vicky (21, an art teacher in grammar school and very nice) how to play Tarock [the Viennese version of the Italian game], and we play a great deal. I would like a refresher course with you experts, however, as I am sure there are many conventions we do not know—various ways to reveal yourself to your partner, etc. Anyway, your Tarock pack is in good use….