… I must at all costs make over the cottage and get a live-in nanny next spring so I can start trying to write and get my independence again … Love to Warren and Maggie—
Sylvia
Actually, this emphasis on her lack of funds may have been an exaggeration intended to convey her sense of urgency. Ted Hughes says that he borrowed money from his family when he left and between September and early February gave her over £900.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1962
Dear Mother,
I feel I owe you a happier letter than my last one. Now that I have come to my decision to get a legal separation and have an appointment with an immensely kind-sounding lawyer in London tomorrow (recommended to me by my equally kind accountant), I begin to see that life is not over for me. It is the uncertainty, week after week, that has been such a torture. And, of course, the desire to hang on to the last to see if something, anything, could be salvaged. I am just as glad the final blows have been delivered …
It is a beautiful day here, clear and blue. I got this nanny back for today and tomorrow. She is a whiz, and I see what a heaven my life could be if I had a good live-in nanny. I am eating my first warm meal since I’ve come back—having an impersonal person in the house is a great help. I went up to Winifred’s [the midwife] for three hours the night I realized Ted wasn’t coming back, and she was a great help … Since I made the decision, miraculously, my own life, my wholeness, has been seeping back. I will try to rent [the house] for the winter and go to Ireland—this is a dream of mine—to purge myself of this awful experience by the wild beauty I found there, and the children would thrive. Quite practically, I have no money to go farther. I have put all my earnings this summer in a separate account, the checking account is at zero, and there are 300 pounds I have taken from our joint savings—just about the last of them—as Ted said at one point I could, as some recompense for my lost nanny-grant, to build over the cottage. This is a must. Also getting a TV for a nanny. I can’t have one live in this house or I could have no guests, and I do want to entertain what friends and relatives I have as often as I can. I dream of Warren and Maggie! I would love to go on a skiing holiday in the Tyrol with them someday. I just read about it in the paper. And then if I do a novel or two, I might apply for a Guggenheim to go to Rome with a nanny and the children. Right now I have no money, but if I get the cottage done this winter while I’m away, I might sink all my savings in a nanny for a year. My writing should be able to get her the next year …
If I hit it lucky, I might even be able to take a London flat and send the children to the fine free schools there and enjoy the London people (I would starve intellectually here), renting [the house] for the winter, and come down here on holidays and in the spring for the long summer holiday. I feel when the children are school-age, I want to be able to afford this. Some lucky break—like writing a couple of New Yorker stories in Ireland or a play for the BBC (I’ve got lots of fan mail for the half-hour interview I did on why I stayed in England …)—could make this life a reality. But first the cottage, then the nanny. I’ll have to do this out of my own small pocket, as I imagine Ted will only have to pay for the children….
Took Frieda to the playground again today. She is talking wonderfully, says names. I’m getting her two kittens from Mrs. MacNamara next week and trying to go somewhere, on some visit every afternoon with them, to keep busy. Lots of love to you, Warren, and Maggie.
Sylvia
SEPTEMBER 26, 1962
Dear Mother,
I went up to London to the solicitor yesterday—a very harrowing but necessary experience. Not knowing where Ted is, except in London … I hope he will … settle out of court and agree to an allowance …
The laws, of course, are awful: a wife is allowed one third of her husband’s income, and if he doesn’t pay up, the suing is long and costly. If a wife earns anything, her income is included in his and she ends up paying for everything. The humiliation of being penniless and begging money from deaf ears is too much. I shall just have to invest everything with courage in the cottage and the nanny for a year and write like mad. Try to get clear … Together we earned about $7,000 this year, a fine salary, I earning one third. Now it is all gone…. I shall be penalized for earning, or, if I don’t earn, have to beg. Well, I choose the former …
Thank God the solicitor said I could take the children to Ireland. I am hoping to let this place, but must go even if I can’t….
I am sorry to be so worrying at this time when your own concerns are so pressing, but I must get control of my life, the little I have left.
With love,
Sivvy
SEPTEMBER 29, 1962
Dearest Mother,
It is going on 6:30 in the morning, and I am warm in my study, Pifco going, with my first cup of morning coffee. Winifred, for all her lack of imagination, is full of good sense, and I love her for it. She is very busy, so after my one 3-hour evening session with her when deciding what to do, I only will see her briefly for social occasions and practical questions. It was she who suggested that when I wake up early and am unable to sleep, I come in and work on my novel before the babies get up … Well, of course, just now my emotions are such that “working on my novel” is so difficult as to be almost impossible, but I actually did do three pages yesterday and hope to work into it, first numbly, then with feeling.
It is the evenings here, after the children are in bed, that are the worst, so I might as well get rid of them by going to bed. I feel pretty good in the morning, and my days are, thank goodness, busy. I find that by eating my meals with Frieda in the kitchen it is easier to eat something, and every day I religiously make tea in the nursery at four, try to invite someone or take them to see someone, so each day I have a time with other people who know nothing or, at least, who are darling, like the Comptons.
I do have to take sleeping pills, but they are, just now, a necessary evil and enable me to sleep deeply and then do some writing and feel energetic during the day if I drink lots of coffee right on waking …
The solicitor says I am within my legal right and to draw all money out of our joint accounts and put them in accounts of my own since my husband has deserted me … So do send me that $500 “gift” and another $500 at Christmas, if I need it. I have to make an outlay for the cottage this winter and get a nanny in the spring. Having the nanny here from the agency made me realize what heaven it would be, and I don’t break down with someone else around.
Love,
Sivvy
OCTOBER 9, 1962
Dear Mother,
I don’t know where to begin. I just can’t take the $50. [I finally persuaded her to do so, monthly, and I opened a joint account in a London bank, so she could use it in any emergency, hoping she would consider returning to the United States. We, as a family, were prepared to set her up in her own apartment here.]
… Just sold a long New Yorker poem. I’ll get by. Ted has agreed to give us 1,000 pounds a year maintenance. This will just take care of rates, heat, light, food, with 200 pounds for the children’s clothing and upkeep expenses. I want nothing for me. I’ll pay the upkeep and gas and taxes on the car, Ted’s life insurance (which is made out to me and will be a kind of pension …) and for nannies. Right now I get up a couple of hours before the babies and write. I’ve got to … I’ve made out accounts, and it is a scrape … I pray he will sign the maintenance …
I am getting a divorce. It is the only thing….
I should say right away America is out for me. I want to make my life in England. If I start running now, I will never stop. I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius … I must make a life all my own as fast as I can … the flesh has dropped from my bones. But I am a fighter. Money is my only way to fight myself into a new life. I know pretty much what I want …
[Eventually] I want to have a flat in London, where the cultural life is what I am starved for … Also, as you can see, I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The h
orror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I cannot face you again until I have a new life; it would be too great a strain. I would give heaven and earth to have a visit from Aunt Dot or Warren and Margaret. Can the latter come in spring?
The shock to me has been an enormity…. I was very stupid, very happy … no time … to make any plans of my own. As you may imagine, the court case is for me to appear in, not he. A necessary evil …
… Dot’s letter a great consolation. Reassure me she’ll accept the divorce [she is a devout Catholic] and not stop her kindness for that. I have no one…. Stuck down here as into a sack, I fight for air and freedom and the culture and the libraries of a city.
Do you suppose either Warren or Aunt Dot could fly over to be with me for a few days when I have to face the court? I don’t know whether it will be this autumn (I doubt it, alas) or next spring, but I will need protection. I look to Warren so, now that I have no man, no adviser. He was so good and sweet here …
Everything is breaking—my dinner set cracking in half, the health inspector says the cottage should be demolished—there is no hope for it, so I shall have to do over the long, unfinished room in the house instead. Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder, and I am all over stings …
I must get to London next fall….
Please tell Warren to write and say he and Maggie will come in spring. In Ireland I feel I may find my soul, and in London next fall, my brain, and maybe in heaven what was my heart.
Love,
S
OCTOBER 12, 1962
Dear Mother,
Your nice fat letter received with many thanks. Do tear up my last one. It was written at what was probably my all-time low, and I have [had] an incredible change of spirit; I am joyous, happier than I have been for ages….
It is over. My life can begin … I am having the long room made over, new floors and will furnish it as a bed-sitting room with TV. I hope to keep this (very expensive) nanny until Ted’s Aunt Hilda comes, as she hopes to, at the end of November, to accompany me to Ireland … Ted does want the divorce, thank goodness, so it shouldn’t be difficult … [In] Ireland—in my darling cottage from December 1 to February 28—I should recover on the milk from TT-tested cows (hope to learn to milk them myself), homemade bread, and the sea!
Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me. As soon as the nanny comes and I know I’ve got a stretch of guaranteed time, I’ll finish the novel. I have forty children’s picture books at my side to review for the leftish weekly I’ve done for them before—Horton Hatches the Egg among them! So send no children’s books; I’ve mountains.
Nick has two teeth, stands, sits, and is an angel. Ted had cut Frieda’s hair short and it looks marvellous, no mess, no straggle. She has two kittens from Mrs. MacNamara: Tiger-Pieker and Skunky-Bunks; the first a tiger, the second black and white. She adores them, croons “Rock-a-bye baby, when the bough breaks” at them. They’re very good for her now.
Did you see my poem “Blackberries” in the September 15 New Yorker? Wrote that when Warren was here last year … Hope, when free, to write myself out of this hole …
… I need a bloody holiday. Ireland is heaven, utterly unspoiled, emerald sea washing in fingers among green fields, white sand, wild coast, cows, friendly people, honey-tasting whisky, peat (turf) fires that smell like spiced bread—thank God, I found it. Just in time.
I go riding tomorrow; love it. Shall send Frieda and Nick to church in London, not here! I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I’ll have a salon in London. I am a famous poetess here—mentioned this week in The Listener as one of the half-dozen women who will last—including Marianne Moore and the Brontës!
x x x Sivvy
P.S. Forget about the court case—I’ll manage that fine alone. Every experience is grist for a novelist.
OCTOBER 12, 1962
Dearest Warren and Maggie,
Your lovely letter arrived today and cheered me immensely. How often I have thought of you both! I have been through the most incredible hell for six months, influenza, the lot, and amazingly enough, now … to have something definite … the release in my energy is enormous …
The one thing I retain is love for and admiration of [Ted’s] writing. I know he is a genius, and for a genius there are no bonds and no bounds…. It is hurtful to be ditched … but thank God I have my own work. If I did not have that I do not know what I would do. I have a considerable reputation over here and am writing from dawn to when the babes wake, a poem a day, and they are terrific.
So glad you are behind me on the nanny, Warren. I am and have been an intelligent woman, and this year of country life has been, for me, a cultural death. No plays, films, art shows, books, people! … Now I am stuck; but not for long. I plan to go to Ireland to a lovely cottage by the sea from December to February to recover my health and my heart, then return here for spring and summer, see you and Maggie I hope and pray, my good friends, the Alan Sillitoes (now, alas, in Tangier for a year), and Marty and Mike Plumer if they come. The loneliness here now is appalling. Then I shall fight for a London flat … I shall be able to do free-lance broadcasting, reviewing, and have a circle of intellectual friends in London. I loved living there and never wanted to leave. You can imagine how ironic it is to me that Ted is now living there, after he said it was “death” to him … I will try to finish my novel and a second book of poems by Christmas. I think I’ll be a pretty good novelist, very funny—my stuff makes me laugh and laugh, and if I can laugh now it must be hellishly funny stuff.
I wish you would both consider going on a holiday to Germany and Austria when you come. You should know some lovely places in the Tyrol, and I would love to go with you! I just dread ever going on a holiday alone. I could leave the babies with the nanny for a couple of weeks, and you could begin and end your stay here. I would be very cheerful and entertaining by then, I promise you.
Just now I am a bit of a wreck, bones literally sticking out all over and great, black shadows under my eyes from sleeping pills, a smoker’s hack (I actually took up smoking the past month out of desperation—my solicitor started it by offering me a cigarette, and I practically burned off all my eyebrows, I was so upset and forgot it was lit! But now I’ve stopped). I do hope Dotty isn’t going to snub me because of the divorce, although I know Catholics think it’s a sin. Her support has been marvelous for me. I hope you can tactfully convey to mother, Warren, that we should not meet for at least a year … when I am happy in my new London life. After this summer, I just could not bear to see her; it would be too painful and recall too much. So you and dear Maggie, whom I already love, come instead.
Tell me you’ll consider taking (I mean escorting! I’ll have money!) me to Austria with you, even if you don’t, so I’ll have that to look forward to. I’ve had nothing to look forward to for so long! The half year ahead seems like a lifetime, and the half behind an endless hell. Your letters are like glühwein to me. (I must really learn German. I want above all to speak it.) Do write me again. So proud of your Chicago speech, Warren! I want both you and Maggie henceforth to consider yourselves godparents to both Frieda and Nick. Lord knows, they need as many as they can have, and the best! Lots of love to you both.
Sivvy
OCTOBER 16, 1962
Dear Mother,
I am writing with my old fever of 101° alternating with chills back. I must have someone with me for the next two months to mind the babies while I get my health back and try to write … I need help very much just now. Home is impossible. I can go nowhere with the children, and I am ill, and it would be psychologially the worst thing to see you now or to go home. I have free doctor’s care here, cheap help possible though not now available, and a home I love and will
want to return to in summer to get ready to leap to London. To make a new life. I am a writer … I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name. I could finish the novel in six weeks of day-long work. I have a gift of an inspiration for another.
Got a $100 “birthday present” from Dotty today; $300 from Mrs. Prouty. Thank God.
Very bad luck with nanny agency; a bitch of a woman is coming tomorrow from them; doesn’t want to cook, do any breakfast or tea, wondered if there was a butler. Ten pounds a week. If I had time to get a good nanny, possibly an Irish girl to come home with me, I could get on with my life … I feel only a lust to study, write, get my brain back and practice my craft.
I have, if you want to know, already had my first novel finished and accepted—it is a secret, and I am on my second. My third—the idea—came this week.
After Ted left with all his clothes and things, I piled the children and two cats in the car and drove to stay with a … couple I know in St. Ives, Cornwall—the most heavenly gold sands by emerald sea. Discovered Cornwall, exhausted but happy, my first independent act! I have no desire but to build a new life. Must start here. When I have my second book of poems done, my third novel, and the children are of age, I may well try a year of creative-writing lecturing in America and a Cape Cod summer. But not just now. I must not go back to the womb or retreat. I must make steps out, like Cornwall, like Ireland.