Friday, June 20. My motto here might well be “My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.” I have been and am battling depression. It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart. I knew this fresh life would be harder, much harder, than teaching—but I have weapons, and self-knowledge is the best of them. I was blackly hysterical last fall beginning my job: The outside demands exacted my blood, and I feared. Now, a totally different situation, yet the same in emotional content. I have fourteen months “completely free” for the first time in my life, reasonable financial security, and the magic and hourly company of a husband so magnificent … big, creative in a giant way, that I imagine I made him up—only he offers so much extra surprise that I know he is real and deep as an iceberg in its element. So I have all this, and my limbs are paralyzed: inside demands exact my blood, and I fear—because I have to make up my demands: the hardest responsibility in the world: there is no outer recalcitrant material to blame for snags and failures, only the bristling inner recalcitrance: sloth, fear, vanity, meekness. I know, even as I wrote last fall, that if I face and command this experience and produce a book of poems, stories, a novel, learn German and read Shakespeare and Aztec anthropology and The Origin of Species—as I faced and commanded the different demands of teaching—I shall never be afraid again of myself. And if I am not afraid of myself—of my own craven fears and wincings—I shall have little left in the world to be afraid of—of accident, disease, war, yes—but not of my standing up to it. This is, of course, a manner of whistling in the dark. I have even longed for that most fearsome first woman’s ordeal: having a baby—to elude my demanding demons and have a constant excuse for lack of production in writing. I must first conquer my writing and experience, and then will deserve to conquer childbirth. Paralysis. Once the outer tensions are gone: I sit on a cold gray June day in welcome of the green gloom of leaves, I fall back and back into myself, dredging deep, longing to revisit my first hometown: Winthrop, not Wellesley. Jamaica Plain even: The names are become talismans. The church clock, or is it angelus? strikes twelve in its queer measured sequences of bells. I have let almost a month slip by—going to New York, to Wellesley and apartment hunting. Frittering. Being with people. I say it is people I need, yet what good have they done me? Perhaps, as I try a story, I shall discover. I lean on the window, forehead to the glass, waiting for the blue-uniformed mailman to walk out from the house, having left letters of acceptance.…
I go suspended in the void, the vacuum, the exhaust of the year’s teaching machine, which speeds off clicking and purring. I must, again for the first time … and for the longest time, tightly and creatively structure my days—fill myself with reading and writing projects—keep a clean and well-run house, get rid of my slovenly sickness. We found this week an “ideal” apartment—ideal aesthetically if not in high price and kitchen crammed against one wall of the living room. But the view, oh, the view, yes, the view. Two tiny rooms for $115 a month, and yet light, quiet and a sixth floor Beacon Hill view to the river, with two bay windows, one each for Ted and me to write in. I await only Marianne Moore’s letter before I can send off my application for a Saxton grant, which would just cover an economical ten months of our contracted year and relieve my puritan conscience completely about the rent. The rented Beacon Hill flat gives our summer free peace. I write here, because I am paralyzed everywhere else. Compulsive. As if in reaction to the dance, the tarantella of the teaching year, my mind shuts against knowledge, study: I fritter, gliddery—pick up this and that, wipe a dish, stir up some mayonnaise, jump at the imagined note of the mailman’s whistle above the roar of traffic. I am disappointed with my poems: they pall. I have only a few over 25 and want a solid forty. I have distant subjects. I haven’t opened my experience up. I keep discarding and discarding. My mind is barren of ideas and I must scavenge themes as a magpie must: scraps and oddments. I feel paltry, wanting in richness. Fearful, inadequate, desperate. As if my mind clicked into a “fix,” which stood frozen and blinkered. And I must slowly set my lands in order: make my dream of self with poems, breast-sucking babies, a Wife-of-Bath calm, humor and resilience, come clear with time. I face no school-scheduled year, but the hardest year where all choosing is mine, all making and all delays, defaultings, shyings off and all tardy sloths.
*June 25th, Wednesday.* A starred day, probably the first in this whole book. I was going to write here yesterday but was in a teary, blue wits’ end mood. Today I sat to type back letters and more of Ted’s and my poems to send out. Seated at the typewriter, I saw the lovely light-blue shirt of the mailman going into the front walk of the millionairess next door, so I ran downstairs. One letter stuck up out of the mailbox, and I saw The New Yorker on the left corner in dark print. My eyes dazed over. I raced alternatives through my head: I had sent a stamped envelope with my last poems, so they must have lost it and returned the rejects in “one of their” own envelopes. Or it must be a letter for Ted about copyrights. I ripped the letter from the box. It felt shockingly hopefully thin. I tore it open right there on the steps, over mammoth marshmallow Mrs. Whalen sitting in the green yard with her two pale artificially cute little boys in their swimsuits jumping in and out of the rubber circular portable swimming pool and bouncing a gaudy striped ball. The black thick print of Howard Moss’s letter banged into my brain. I saw “MUSSEL HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR seems to me a marvelous poem and I’m happy to say we’re taking it for The New Yorker.…”—at this realization of ten years of hopeful wishful waits (and subsequent rejections) I ran yipping upstairs to Ted and jumping about like a Mexican bean. It was only moments later, calming a little, that I finished the sentence “… as well as NOCTURNE, which we also think extremely fine.” Two POEMS—not only that, two of my longest—91 and 45 lines respectively: They’ll have to use front-spots for both and are buying them in spite of having [a] full load of summer poems and not for filler. This shot of joy conquers an old dragon and should see me through the next months of writing on the crest of a creative wave.
Thursday, June 26.… Looked up spiders and crabs and owls in the sticky deserted gloom of the college library: pleasant to feel ownership of it in sodden summer. Wrote a brief poem this morning—“Owl Over Main Street” in “syllabic” verse. Could be better. The beginning is a bit lyrical for the subject and the last verse might be expanded. I should leave poems to lie, to be re-scrawled, and not be so eager to stick them in my book. I’d like a good fifteen to twenty poems more. That owl we heard on our midnight walk around town, the great feathered underside of the bird’s body, its wide wings spread over the telephone wires—a ghoulish skrwack. Also: the black spider in Spain knotting ants around its rock. Visions of violence. The animal world seems to me more and more intriguing. Odd dreams: drank from a plastic cylindrical bottle with a red tip and realized in horror it was starch-poison I put in it—waited for my stomach to wrench and wither, ran to icebox remembering about antidotes, and swallowed a raw egg whole: Ted says it’s a symbolic dream of conception. Also, last night—a musical comedy and a hundred Danny Kayes. Pulled a piece of skin off my lip and my lips began welling blood, lip-shape—my whole mouth a skinless welling of brilliant red blood.
Thursday, July 3.… I have been writing poems steadily and feel the blessed dawn of a desire to write prose beginning: bought a literary Mlle to whet my emulous urge—don’t feel angry now: have my own time. I am rejecting more and more poems from my book, which is now titled after what I consider one of my best and curiously moving poems about my father-sea-god muse: Full Fathom Five. “The Earthenware Head” is out: once, in England, “my best poem”: too fancy, glassy, patchy and rigid—it embarrasses me now—with its ten elaborate epithets for head in 5 verses. I suppose now my star piece is “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor”: The author’s proofs came from The New Yorker yesterday. Three long columns of them in the blessed New Yorker print which I’ve envisioned for so long. My next ambition is to get a story in The New Yorker—five, ten more years work. A horrid two-day noise of an electric saw cutting a tree down and up and the priests’ angered and disturbed these days. The truck is gone and I hope for peace—the traffic is regular and soft enough to be minimal. I began German—two hours a day, on July 1st. Have started translating Grimm’s fairy tales, making a vocab list, but must work now on the grammar lessons—have forgotten all verb and noun-case forms, but am surprised enough I can get the sense of a story after two years of not touching it. My life is in my hands. I’m plowing through Penguin books on Aztecs, the personality of animals, man and the vertebrates. So much to read, but this year I will make out schedules, lists—that is a help. Ted has given me several poetry subjects and assignments which are highly exciting: I’ve already written a good short poem on the groundhog and on landowners and am eager for others.
Friday, July 4. Independence Day: how many people know from what they are free, by what they are imprisoned. Cool air, Canadian air, changed the atmosphere in the night and I woke to cool weather, cool enough for hot tea and sweatshirt. I woke to feed our baby bird. Yesterday, with this queer, suffocating hysteria on me—partly, I think, from not writing prose: stories, my novel—I walked out with Ted in the dense humid air. He stopped by a tree on the street. There on bare ground, on its back, scrawny wings at a desperate stretch, a baby bird, fallen from its nest, convulsed in what looked like a death-shudder. I was sick with its hurt, nauseous. Ted carried it home cradled in his hand, and it looked out with a bright dark eye. We put it in a small box of cardboard, stuffed with a dish towel and bits of soft paper to simulate a nest. The bird shook and shook. It seemed to be off balance, fell on its back. Every moment I expected the breath in its scrawny chest to stop. But no. We tried to feed it with bread soaked in milk on a toothpick, but it sneezed, didn’t swallow. Then we went downtown and bought fresh ground steak, very like worm shapes, I thought. As we came up the stairs the bird squawked piteously and opened its yellow froggish beak wide as itself so its head wasn’t visible behind the fork-tongued opening. Without thinking, I shoved a sizeable piece of meat down the bird’s throat. The beak closed on my fingertip, the tongue seemed to suck my finger, and the mouth, empty, opened again. Now I feed the bird fearlessly with meat and bread and it eats often and well, sleeping in between two-hourly feedings and looking a bit more like a proper bird. However small, it is an extension of life, sensibility and identity. When I am ready for a baby it will be wonderful. But not until then. Wickedly didn’t do German for the last two days, in a spell of perversity and paralysis.
Last night Ted and I did PAN [Ouija board] for the first time in America. We were rested, warm, happy in our work and the overturned brandy glass responded admirably, oddly often with charming humor. Even if our own hot subconscious pushes it (it says, when asked, that it is “like us”), we had more fun than a movie. There are so many questions to ask it. I wonder how much is our own intuition working, and how much queer accident, and how much “my father’s spirit.” PAN informed us my book of poems will be published by Knopf, not World (they are “liars” at World—a strange note: do I feel this?). Also: fifty poems for my book. We will have two sons before we have a girl and should name the boys Owen or Gawen, the girl Rosalie. Pan recited a poem of his own called “Moist,” stated his favorite poem of Ted’s is “Pike” (“I like fish”) and of mine is “Mussel Hunter” (“Kolossus likes it”). Kolossus is Pan’s “family god.” He advises me to lose myself in reading when depressed (it’s the “hot weather”) and claims my novel will be about love, and I should start writing it in November. Among other penetrating observations Pan said I should write on the poem subject “Lorelei” because they are my “own kin.” So today for fun I did so, remembering the plaintive German song Mother used to play and sing to us beginning “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten.…” The subject appealed to me doubly (or triply): the German legend of the Rhine sirens, the sea-childhood symbol, and the death-wish involved in the song’s beauty. The poem devoured my day, but I feel it is a book poem and am pleased with it. Must agonizingly begin prose—an irony, this paralysis, while day by day I do poems—and also other reading—or I will be unable to speak human speech, lost as I am in my inner wordless Sargasso.
Monday, July 7. I am evidently going through a stage in beginning writing similar to my two months of hysteria in beginning teaching last fall. A sickness, frenzy of resentment at everything but myself at the bottom. I lie wakeful at night, wake exhausted with that sense of razor-shaved nerves. I must be my own doctor. I must cure this very destructive paralysis and ruinous brooding and daydreaming. If I want to write, this is hardly the way to behave—in horror of it, frozen by it. The ghost of the unborn novel is a Medusa-head. Witty or simply observant character notes come to me. But I have no idea how to begin. I shall, perhaps, just begin. I am somewhere in me sure I should write a good “book poem” a day—but that is nonsense—I go wild when I spend a day writing a bad twelve lines—as I did yesterday. My danger, partly, I think, is becoming too dependent on Ted. He is didactic, fanatic—this last I see most when we are with other people who can judge him in a more balanced way than I—such as Leonard Baskin, for example. It is as if I were sucked into a tempting but disastrous whirlpool. Between us there are no barriers—it is rather as if neither of us—or especially myself—had any skin, or one skin between us and we kept bumping into and abrading each other. I enjoy it when Ted is off for a bit. I can build up my own inner life, my own thoughts, without his continuous “What are you thinking? What are you going to do now?” which makes me promptly and recalcitrantly stop thinking and doing. We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself—make myself and not let myself be made by him. He gives orders—mutually exclusive: read ballads an hour, read Shakespeare an hour, read history an hour, think an hour and then “You read nothing in an hour—bits, read things straight through.” His fanaticism and complete lack of balance and moderation is illustrated by his stiff neck, got from his “exercises”—which evidently are strenuous enough to disable him.
… On the path we found a dead mole—the first I have ever seen—a tiny creature with bare flat feet, looking like a tiny man’s, and pallid white pushy-looking hands—a delicate snout and its sausage-shaped body all covered with exquisite gray-blue velvety fur. We also found a dead red squirrel, perfect, its eye glazed in death, and stiff. I felt somehow nonexistent—had a sudden joy in talking to a grease-stained husky garage mechanic boy. He seemed real. Unless the self has enormous centering power, it flies off in all directions through space without the bracing and regulating tensions of necessary work, other people and their lives. But I won’t get my writing schedule from outside—it must come from within. I’ll leave off poems for a bit—finish the books I’m now in the middle of (at least five!), do German (that I can do) and write a kitchen article (for The Atlantic’s “Accent on Living”?), a Harper’s Cambridge student life article—a story, “The Return,” and suddenly attack my novel from the middle. Oh, for a plot.
Wednesday, July 9. Freshly bathed, it being early for once and not too hot. We are recovering after a week of the bird. Last night we killed him. It was terrible. He wheezed, lay on one side like a stove-in ship in his shit streaks, tail feathers drabbled, rallying to open his mouth, convulsing. What was it? I held him in my hand, cradling his warm heartbeat and feeling sick to the pit of my stomach: Ted no better—I let him take the bird for a day and he was as sick as I. We hadn’t slept for a week, listening for his scrabble in the box, waking at blue dawn and hearing him flutter his pinfeather wings against the cardboard sides. We couldn’t see what was wrong with his leg—only that it had folded, useless, under his stomach. We walked out through the park—not wanting to go back to the house and the sick bird. We went to the tree where we’d found him and looked up to see if there was a nest—we’d been too upset to look when we picked him up a week ago. From a dark hole about ten feet up in the trunk a small brownish bird face looked, then vanished. A white shit shot out in a neat arc onto the sidewalk. So that was why our little bird had his habit of backing to the edge of his papers. I resented the hale, whole birds in the tree. We went home: the bird peeped feebly, rallied to peck at our fingers. Ted fixed our rubber bath hose to the gas jet on the stove and taped the other end into a cardboard box. I could not look and cried and cried. Suffering is tyrannous. I felt desperate to get the sickly little bird off our necks, miserable at his persistent pluck and sweet temper. I looked in. Ted had taken the bird out too soon and it lay in his hand on its back, opening and shutting its beak terribly and waving its up-turned feet. Five minutes later he brought it to me, composed, perfect and beautiful in death. We walked in the dark bluing night of the park, lifted one of the druid stones, dug a hole in its crater, buried him and rolled the stone back. We left ferns and a green firefly on the grave, felt the stone roll of our hearts.
Prose writing has become a phobia to me: my mind shuts and I clench. I can’t, or won’t, come clear with a plot. Must put poetry aside and begin a story tomorrow. Today was useless, a wash of exhaustion after the bird. Always excuses. I wrote what I consider a “book poem” about my runaway ride in Cambridge on the horse Sam: a hard subject for me, horses alien to me, yet the daredevil change in Sam and my hanging on god knows how is a kind of revelation: it worked well. Hard as my little gored picador poem was hard. But now I can’t write as I used to—generally, philosophically, with “Thoughts that found a mare of mermaid hair / tangling in the tide’s green fall”—I have to write my “Lorelei”—to present the mermaids, invoke them. Make them real. I write my good poems too fast—they are on objects, not themes, thus concrete, limited. Good enough, but I must extend.…
Saturday, July 12. I feel a change in my life: of rhythm and expectancy, and now, at 11 in the morning, tired, very, yet steady after our great talk last night. A change has come: will it tell, a month from now, a year from now? It is, I think, not a false start. But a revision of an old, crippling delusion into a sturdy-shoed, slow-plodding common-sense program. Yesterday was the nadir. All day I had been sitting at an abstract poem about mirrors and identity which I hated, felt chilled, desperate, about my month’s momentum (over 10 poems in that time) run down, a rejection from The Kenyon sealing hopelessness. I began realizing poetry was an excuse and escape from writing prose. I looked at my sentence notes for stories, much like the notes jotted here on the opposite page: I picked the most “promising” subject—the secretary returning on the ship from Europe, her dreams tested and shattered. She was not gorgeous, wealthy, but small, almost stodgy, with few good features and a poor temperament. The slicks leaned over me: demanding romance, romance—should she be gorgeous? Should Mrs. Aldrich, so normal and plodding and good with her seven children, have an affair with young, sweet Mr. Cruikshank across the street? I ran through my experience for ready-made “big” themes: there were none.… All paled, palled—a glassy coverlid getting in the way of my touching it. Too undramatic. Or was my outlook too undramatic? Where was life? It dissipated, vanished into thin air, and my life stood weighed and found wanting because it had no ready-made novel plot, because I couldn’t simply sit down at the typewriter and by sheer genius and willpower begin a novel dense and fascinating today and finish next month. Where, how, with what and for what to begin? No incident in my life seemed ready to stand up for even a 20-page story. I sat paralyzed, feeling no person in the world to speak to. Cut off totally from humanity in a self-induced vacuum. I felt sicker and sicker. I couldn’t happily be anything but a writer and I couldn’t be a writer. I couldn’t even set down one sentence: I was paralyzed with fear, with deadly hysteria. I sat in the hot kitchen unable to blame lack of time, the sultry July weather, anything but myself. The white hard-boiled eggs, the green head of lettuce, two suave pink veal chops dared me to do anything with them, to make a meal out of them, to alter their single, leaden identity into a digestible meal. I had been living in an idle dream of being a writer. And here stupid housewives and people with polio were getting their stories into The Sat Eve Post. I went into Ted, utterly shattered, and asked him to tackle the veal chops. And burst into tears. Useless, good-for-nothing. We talked it out, analyzed it. I felt the lead tons of the world lift. I have been spoiled, so spoiled by my early success with Seventeen, with Harper’s and Mademoiselle, I figured if I ever worked over a story and it didn’t sell, or wrote a piece for practice and couldn’t market it, something was wrong. I was gifted, talented—oh, all the editors said so—so why couldn’t I expect big returns for every minute of writing? A cracking good story a week? I demanded a 20-page plot about a top-of-the-head subject that didn’t engage me. Now, every day, I am writing 5 pages, about 1,500 words on a small vignette, a scene charged with emotion, conflict, and that is that: to make these small bits of life, which I discarded as trivial, not serious “plot material.” I cannot correct faults in rhythm, in realization—in thin air. I spend 3 hours, and shall from now on, in writing, not letting a bad or slight subject engulf the day.
Thursday, July 17. After two days of no-schedule, disrupted by our seeing Baskins, Rodman* [omission] … I sit down on a clear cold sunny day with nothing to beef at except the slick sick feeling which won’t leave. It comes and goes. I feel I could crack open mines of life—in my daily writing sketches, in my reading and planning: if only I could get rid of my absolutist panic. I have, continually, the sense that this time is invaluable, and the opposite sense that I am paralyzed to use it: or will use it wastefully and blindly. I have all the world’s reading on my back, instead of a possible book a day. I must discipline myself to concentrate on certain authors, certain fields, lest I welter, knowing nothing and everything. Across the street there is the chink, chink of hammers on nails, the tap of hammers on wood. Men are on the scaffolding. I am neither a know-nothing nor a bohemian, but I find myself wishing, wishing, to have a corner of my own: something I can know about, write about well. All I have ever read thins and vanishes: I do not amass, remember. I shall this year work for steady small growth, nothing spectacular, and the ridding of this panic. The windows shake in their sockets from some unheard detonation. Ted says they are breaking the sound barrier. Somewhere I have a vision, not of thwarting, of meanness, but of fullness, of a maturer, riper placidity, a humor to bear nightmare, an ordering, reshaping faculty which steadies and fears not. A housewife—with children and writing and reading in the midst of business, but fully, with good friends who are makers in some way. The more I do, the more I can do. I should choose first the few things I wish to learn: German, poets and poetry, novels and novelists, art and artists. French also. Are they making or breaking across the street there? All fears are figments: I make them up.
Marianne Moore sent a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter in answer to my poems and request that she be a reference for my Saxton. So spiteful it is hard to believe it: comments of absolutely no clear meaning or help, resonant only with great unpleasantness: “don’t be so grisly,” “I only brush away the flies” (this for my graveyard poem), “you are too unrelenting” (in “Mussel Hunter”), and certain pointed remarks about “typing being a bugbear,” so she sends back the poems we sent. I cannot believe she got so tart and acidy simply because I sent her carbon copies (“clear,” she remarks). This, I realize, must be my great and stupid error—sending carbons to the American lady of letters. Perhaps I thus queered my chance of a Saxton.…
Saturday, July 19. Paralysis still with me. It is as if my mind stopped and let the phenomena of nature—shiny green rose bugs and orange toadstools and screaking woodpeckers—roll over me like a juggernaut—as if I had to plunge to the bottom of nonexistence, of absolute fear, before I can rise again. My worst habit is my fear and my destructive rationalizing. Suddenly my life, which had always clearly defined immediate and long-range objectives—a Smith scholarship, a Smith degree, a won poetry or story contest, a Fulbright, a Europe trip, a lover, a husband—has or appears to have none. I dimly would like to write (or is it to have written?) a novel, short stories, a book of poems. And fearfully, dimly, would like to have a child: a bloodily breached twenty-year plan of purpose. Lines occur to me and stop dead: “The tiger lily’s spotted throat.” And then it is an echo of Eliot’s “The tiger in the tiger pit,” to the syllable and the consonance. I observe: “The mulberry berries redden under leaves.” And stop. I think the worst thing is to exteriorize these jitterings and so will try to shut up and not blither to Ted. His sympathy is constant temptation. I am made to be busy, gay, doing crazy jobs and writing this and that—stories and poems and nursing babies. How to catapult myself into this? When I stop moving, other lives and single-track aims shoulder me into shadow. I am fixed, fixated on neatness—I can’t take things as they come, or make them come as I choose. Will this pass like a sickness? I wish I could get some womanly impartial advice on this. Defensively, I say I know nothing: lids shut over my mind. And this is the old way of lying: I can’t be responsible, I know nothing. Grub-white mulberries redden under leaves. Teaching was good for me: it structured my mind and forced me to be articulate. If I don’t settle my trouble from within, no outside shower of fortune will make the grass grow. I feel under opiates, hashish—heavy with paralysis—all objects slipping from numb fingers, as in a bad dream. Even when I sit at my typewriter, I feel as if what I wrote were written by an imbecile ten miles off. I am on the bird now, and have been for two days: I have written eighteen pages of confused repetitious observation: Miriam felt this, Owen said that, the bird did this. I have not gotten to the dramatic part where they kill and bury the bird, whose sickness has come to dominate their lives. I am sure of the solidity of the subject but not sure of the emotional line and crisis of my story: yet it will be a story. Tomorrow morning I will finish it and begin it over again, drawing structure out of it. I must be ghastly to live with. Incompetence sickens me to scorn, disgusts me, and I am a bungler, who has taken a bad turn in fortune—rejected by an adult world, part of nothing—of neither an external career of Ted’s—his internal career when written out, perhaps—nor a career of my own, nor, vicariously, the life of friends, nor part of motherhood—I long for an external view of myself and my room to confirm its reality. Vague aims—to write—fail, stillborn. I sense a talent, sense a limited fixity of view stifling me now. I would be supremely happy, I tell myself, if I could only get “in the swing” of writing stories. I have two ideas! bless them—enough for a summer!—a serious bird story where the bird becomes a tormenting spirit and by its small sick pulse darkens and twists two lives—and the story I’ll get all the factual background for when I visit Spaulding’s on the Cape: I want to learn how she built and designed those cottages. Work and work on human interest of how she’ll get a house herself. Saving her pennies, antiques—Lester’s illnesses. Humbly, I can begin these things. Start in two realities that move me, probe their depths, angles, dwell on them. I want to know all kinds of people, to have the talent ready, practiced, ordered, to use them. To ask them the right questions. I forget. I must not forget, not panic, but walk about bold and curious and observant as a newspaper reporter, developing my way of articulation and ordering, losing nothing, not sitting under a snail shell.
Sunday, July 27. A gray day, cool, gentle. The strangling noose of worry, of hysteria, paralysis, is miraculously gone. Doggedly, I have waited it out, and doggedly, been rewarded. The prose does not prosper. I am rewriting an old story, a two-year-old story, “The Return,” amazed at the lush, gaudy, giddy romantic rhetoric. I have written four or five quite good poems this past ten days, after a sterile hysterical ten days of nonproduction. The poems are, I think, deeper, more sober, somber (yet well colored) than any I’ve yet done. I’ve written two about Benidorm, which was closed to me as a poem subject till now. I think I am opening up new subjects and have, instead of a desperate high-keyed rhetoric, a plainer, realer poetry. I’ve about 29 poems for my book—a perpetual maximum it seems, but have discarded already half of those written in my hectic April vacation week, and several written since, my earliest being “Faunus,” “Strumpet Song,” which I wrote just after I met Ted. I have a peculiar and very enervating fever, and have had, these last days. I have been ridiculously exhausted every morning, as if waking out of a coma, a queer deathlike state, when Ted brings me juice—and that, late enough, about ten o’clock, after ten hours of sleep. What is it? I am in the prime of life, my best years ahead to work in, to write poems and have children, and I am exhausted, a dull, electric burning dessicating my skull, my bloodstream. Will I write here in perfect health from our little Boston apartment in a month and more? I hope so. I feel I am beginning solidly and calmly to face the work ahead, expecting a minimum of produce with a maximum of work, study and devotion. Read some of Hardy’s poems with Ted at tea—a moving, highly kindred mind, Hardy’s, especially “An Ancient to Ancients,” and “Last Words to a Dumb Friend.”
August 2, Saturday. I have a strong feeling of sickness, of which I am heartily sick. A life of doing nothing is death. Our life is ridiculously ingrown, sedentary. [Omission.]
Later: Sunday morning: It is as if I needed crises of some sort to exercise my fiber. I find all cool, clear and possible this morning. The great fault of America—this part of it—is its air of pressure: expectancy of conformity. It is hard for me to realize that Dot and Frank† probably don’t like Ted simply because he “won’t get a job, a steady career.” I have actually married exactly the sort of man I most admire. I will shut up about the future for a year and face work and encourage Ted’s work, in which I have the greatest of faith. I find myself horrified at voicing the American dream of a home and children—my visions of a home, of course, being an artist’s estate, in a perfect privacy of wilderness acres, on the coast of Maine. I will no doubt be an impractical vagabond wife and mother, a manner of exile. I must work for an inner serenity and stability which will bear me through the roughest of weathers externally: a calm, sustaining, optimistic philosophy which does not depend on a lifelong street address within easy driving distance of an American supermarket. And what fun to see England with Ted, to live in Italy, the south of France. If I can work this year like mad and get one woman’s story published, a book of poems finished, I will be pleased: also, review and read German and French. Ironically, I have my own dream, which is mine, and not the American dream. I want to write funny and tender women’s stories. I must be also funny and tender and not a desperate woman, like Mother. Security is inside me and in Ted’s warmth. [Omission.]
August 3, Sunday. Felt a sudden ridiculous desire this morning to investigate the Catholic Church—so much in it I would not be able to accept: I would need a Jesuit to argue me—I am yet young, strong—must seek adventure and not depend on a companion. As for children—I’ll be happier to have worked a year on writing, had a holiday—before I begin with them: once I have a baby, I won’t be able to go on writing unless I have a firm foundation for it. The apartment, small as it is, will encourage little housework and cooking. Peace, I must tell myself, so it becomes an instinctive sense; peace is interior, radiating outward. I must keep notebooks of people, places—to recall them. Now: a plane drones, cars whoosh by, a few birds are chirping, a car door bangs, Ted has just thrown down a paper, sighed, and his pen is scratching rapidly. I must learn to lead my own life with him, but not lean on him for every move.…
August 8, Friday. “He is the transparence of the place in which He is and in his poems we find peace.”—Stevens
I am awestruck, excited, smiling inside creamy as a cat: The day has evaporated, quite gone, in a rapt contemplation of my poem “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” which came out in the August 9 issue of the blessed glossy New Yorker—the title in that queer, wobbly, half-archaic type I’ve dreamed poem and story titles in for about eight years. Queerest of all, I dreamed the poem would come out last night! Luckily I told Ted my dream—about Howard Moss and some poet who’d “finally got into The New Yorker,” even though he had a note in italics at the bottom of the poem saying it had been almost completely revised and edited by a woman named, I think, Anne Morrow (a sense of Moss changing my lowercase letters to capitals, adding commas and subtracting hyphens?)—in my dream, my poem was clipped, as on a dummy copy, on the left-hand side of a page between a left-hand column and a right-hand page of ads. I was amazed when Florence Sultan‡ called me and told me my poem was in. I went over, drank wine with her and admired the baby, Sonia, who has suddenly got to be a dark curly-haired blue-eyed image of Florence, sweet and solid. There the poem was in her copy, the first poem in the magazine, page 22, taking up almost a whole page on the left, except for about an inch and a half of a 3-column story at the bottom—plenty of shiny white New Yorker space around my two-column poem, about 45 lines in each column. Well, this week will soon be over. I have the naïve idea people all over the world will be reading and marveling at the poem! Of course, it inhibits my poetry in one way (what other work could achieve this grandeur!) and yet, deep in me, it encourages my prose immensely—that I, too, may work my stories up to the exquisite several-paged surface of the ones next to and following my poems seems less like a mad goal.
August 27, Wednesday. Fury jams the gullet and spreads poison, but, as soon as I start to write, dissipates, flows out into the figure of the letters: writing as therapy? A venomous blowup with landlady, Mrs. Whalen. Insane accusations on her part, tremulous retorts and disgust on mine: a shaming encounter: behind our back, while we were at the Cape, she took the living room rug to be cleaned (which I had told her we had a right to as floor covering, it being a “furnished apartment”) and substituted a filthy summer straw mat whose spots and stains loomed to meet the eye. She also took all the curtains. Deceit, insult, fury: last night we discovered this—or, rather, this morning—as we drove back at night through mist and cold black woods—I had a panic fear in the dark middle of the wood: we saw two deer: Ted, one, I, that and another: white head and ears pricked up, eyes glowing green, transfixed by the car lights. After the long rainy trip to and from NYC in one day Monday to pick up Warren. This was the last exhaustion—woke hollow at noon after a bare seven hours sleep—coffee only, and then we got stupidly involved reading magazines in the library at Smith, which always sickens me: vitriol between critics, writers, politicians: an arsonist burned to black crisp depicted in Life in the space before death, his skin hanging and curling away like peeled black paint; cremation fires burning in the dead eyes of Anne Frank: horror on horror, injustice on cruelty—all accessible, various—how can the soul keep from flying to fragments—disintegrating, in one wild dispersal? We read, dibbled, for hours—on no food, fools we—shopped—peaches, corn. Then, as I half-sensed it, Mrs. Whalen had to come up—bad conscience about rug and curtains? Fury, rather, about our leaving the house windows open—she plumped her fat white bulk on the stairs, breathed, ranted—we let her go on—“apartment in a mess, terrible shape”—we took her up: “what, exactly, was the mess?” She hemmed, hawed—greasy wall by kitchen sink, dirty venetian blind in bathroom—moved, obviously, by the desire to circuit accusations of spying: she’d “just seen this on running through” —we’d left the apartment in apple-pie order. “Have you looked under the bed?” I said. I felt exhausted, starved, too stupid and sick to be clever and neat—she had no right to criticize the place—which is equivalent to criticizing my housework—no damage to the house: I would have picked up, but after the rug episode feel like smearing filth over it: I am not cool either.… All fury, grist for the mill. I shall rest and, resting more and more, see it whole. I am in the middle of a book on demoniacal possession—cases extremely diverting—but also inspiring—metaphors for states of human experiences as well as the experience itself—as Aphrodite is the personification of lust and rending passion, so these visions of demons are the objective figures of angers, remorse, panic: Possession: Demoniacal and Other: Oesterreich. (p. 94)
Four years ago C. was one day going home from her work when she met in the street the apparition of a woman which spoke to her. Suddenly something like a cold wind blew down her neck as she was speaking, and she at once became as if dumb. Later her voice returned, but very hoarse and shrill.… She then loses the sense of her individuality. [p. 106 Possession by fox:] Neither excommunication nor censing nor any other endeavor succeeded. The fox saying ironically that he was too clever to be taken in by such manoeuvres. Nevertheless he consented to come out freely from the starved body of the sick person if a plentiful feast was offered to him. “How was it to be arranged?” On a certain day at four o’clock there were to be placed in a temple sacred to foxes and situated twelve kilometres away two vessels of rice prepared in a particular way, of cheese, cooked with beans, together with a great quantity of roast mice and raw vegetables, all favorite dishes of magic foxes: Then he would leave the body of the girl exactly at the prescribed time. [p. 116 Of Achilles (Janet hypnotizes “devil”):] Although the patient appeared possessed, his malady was not possession but the emotion of remorse. This was true of so many possessed persons, the devil being for them merely the incarnation of their regrets, remorse, terrors and vices.
To brood over this, to use and change it, not let it flow through like a sieve.…
August 28, Thursday. A chill clear morning. Yesterday’s anger has clearer, finer edges now: I could have said more than I did better than I did, but in four days we will be off—all here will lose its emotional tension and become a flat memory only, to be ordered, embellished by the chameleon mind. Dreamed last night I was beginning my novel—“What is there to look to?” Dody Ventura said—a beginning conversation—then a sentence, a paragraph, inserted first of all for description to “place,” to “set” the scene: a girl’s search for her dead father—for an outside authority which must be developed, instead, from the inside.
Midnight: Still tired, but curiously elated, as if absolved from suffocation—projects bubble—Boston and our flat seems as fine, finer than Widow Mangada’s Mediterranean hideout or our Paris Left Bank room. Suddenly I like people, can be nice, natural.… I think I am growing more casual—am I? Or is this a lull in a merry-go-round of panic blackouts. To take all for what it is and delight in the small pleasures—a good dog poem by Ted: a green afternoon with Esther Baskin and Tobias [their son] under the trees, apples fallen, rotting on the ground, reading her essay of the bat, Ted’s proof of the pike poem—Tobias blond, pink, cherubic, smiling, crowing, crawling, taking the papers from my purse and scattering them about—an atmosphere of books, poems, wood engravings, statues.…
Animal possession in Central Africa (p. 145):
A number of murders … ultimately traced to an old man who had been in the habit of lurking in the long grass beside the path to the river, till some person passed by alone, when he would leap out and stab him, afterwards mutilating the body. He admitted these crimes himself. He could not help it [he said] as he had a strong feeling at times that he was changed into a lion and was impelled as a lion to kill and mutilate … this “were-lion” has been most usefully employed for years in perfect contentment keeping the roads of Chirome in good repair.
September 2, Tuesday.… Liz Taylor is getting Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds, who appears cherubic, round-faced, wronged, in pin curls and house robe—Mike Todd barely cold. How odd these events affect one so. Why? Analogies? I would like to squander money on hair styling, clothes. Yet know power is in work and thought. The rest is pleasant frill. I love too much, too wholly, too simply for any cleverness. Use imagination. Write and work to please. No criticism or nagging. [Omission.] He is a genius. I his wife.
Sunday morning, September 14. Two weeks here have inexplicably withered away. Yesterday we both bogged in a black depression—the late nights, listening sporadically to Beethoven piano sonatas—ruining our mornings, the afternoon sun too bright and accusing for tired eyes, meals running all off-schedule—and me with my old panic fear sitting firm on my back—who am I? What shall I do? The difficult time between twenty-five years of school routine and the fear of dilatory, dilettante days. The city calls—experience and people call, and must be shut out by a rule from within. Tomorrow, Monday, the schedule must begin—regular meals, shoppings, launderings—writing prose and poems in the morning, studying German and French in the afternoon, reading aloud an hour, reading in the evenings. Drawing and walking excursions.… I must be happy first in my own work and struggle to that end, so my life does not hang on Ted’s. The novel would be best to begin this next month. My New Yorker poems were a minor triumph. Who else in the world could I live with and love? Nobody. I picked a hard way which has to be all self-mapped out and must not nag [omission] … (anything Ted doesn’t like: this is nagging); he, of course, can nag me about light meals, straight-necks, writing exercises, from his superior seat. The famed and fatal jealousy of professionals—luckily he is ahead of me so far I never need fear the old superiority heel-grinding—in weak-neck impulse. Perhaps fame will make him insufferable. I will work for its not doing so. Must work and get out of paralysis—write and show him nothing: novel, stories and poems. A misty, furred, gray-sunny Sunday. Must lose paralysis and catapult into small efforts—life for its own sake. A nightmare sequence—jazz breaking through Beethoven, soap opera downstairs shattering profound vocational meditation. Do we, vampirelike, feed on each other? A wall, soundproof, must mount between us. Strangers in our study, lovers in bed. Rocks in the bed. Why?… If I write eleven more good poems I will have a book. Try a poem a day: send book to Keightley§ —ten more during the year—a fifty poem book—while the crass Snodgrasses publish and gain fame. Ted fought for publication before his book, which was an open sesame—gathering prizes and fame. And so do I now fight—but have broken three doors open since June: The New Yorker, Sewanee and The Nation: one a month. I feel suddenly today the absence of fear—the sense of slow, plodding self-dedication. This book led me through a year of struggle and mastery. Perhaps the book I am about to begin will do something akin. Smile, write in secret, showing no one. Amass a great deal. Novel. Poems. Stories. Then send about. Let no book-wishing show—work. I must move myself first, before I move others—a woman famous among women.
Monday, September 15. Brag of bravado, and the fear is on. A panic absolute and obliterating: here all diaries end—the vines on the brick wall opposite end in a branch like a bent green snake. Names, words, are power. I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly. What matters? Wind wuthering in a screen. If I could funnel this into a novel, this fear, this horror—a frog sits on my belly. Stop and ask why you wash, why you dress, you go wild—it is as if love, pleasure, opportunity surrounded me, and I were blind. I talk hysterically—or feel I will explode: I am in a fix: how to get out of it? Some little daily external ritual—I am too ingrown—as if I no longer knew how to talk to anyone but Ted—sat with my face to a wall, a mirror.… I am in a vicious circle—too much alone with no fresh exterior experiences except the walking around, about, staring at people who seem, simply because they are other, to be enviable—the responsibility of my future weighs, terrifies. Why should it? Why can’t I be pragmatic, common? At the end of a teaching day, no matter the reversals, I had earned ten dollars—motive enough, in many minds. I need a vocation and to feel productive and I feel useless. Ignorant. To develop writing when I feel my soul is bitty, scatty, tawdry? Why aren’t I conceited enough to enjoy what I can do and not feel fear? Lawrence bodies the world in his words. Hope, careers—writing is too much for me: I don’t want a job until I am happy with writing—yet feel desperate to get a job—to fill myself up with some external reality—where people accept phone bills, meal-getting, babies, marriage, as part of the purpose to the universe. A purposeless woman with dreams of grandeur. My one want: to do work I enjoy—must keep clear of any confiding in Mother [omission]….
Thursday, September 18. Much happier today—why? Life begins, minutely, to take care of itself—and odd impulse brings a flood of joy, life—queer nice slightly sinister people: at the tattooist’s. Also, even though I got up “late,” nineish, on the wet gray day and felt the usual morning sickness, “what shall I do today that is worthwhile?,” I got right to work after coffee and wrote 5 pages analyzing P.D. [Peter Davison—this work has disappeared]—one or two well-turned sentences. Then I sat and read on my “Bird in the House” story, which was so lumbering and bad I felt I could improve it, worked meticulously on 5 pages and felt better by lunch. A fine mail, even though I got a snotty letter from Weeks‖ rejecting my “Snakecharmer” (although “bewitched by the sinuosity,” etc., etc.), for Ted had a lovely check of $150 for “Dick Straightup,” which makes, with the “Thought-Fox” prize, about $1,000 earned this September. Walked out to deposit check and I got more and more drawn to the tattooist shop—it was chill, about to rain, but Ted acquiesced. We found the place with the display window on Scollay Square and stood outside, I pointing to the panther head, the peacocks, the serpents on the wall. The tattooist, with a pale, odd little fellow inside, [was] looking at us. Then the tattooist came to the door in black cowboy boots, a soiled cotton shirt and tight black chino pants. “You can’t see good enough from out there. Come on in.” We went, gog-eyed, into the little shop, brightly lit, tawdry: I shall spend all next morning writing it up. I got the man talking—about butterfly tattoos, rose tattoos, rabbit-hunt tattoos—wax tattoos—he showed us pictures of Miss Stella—tattooed all over—brocade orientals. I watched him tattoo a cut on his hand, a black, red, green and brown eagle and “Japan” on a sailor’s arm, “Ruth” on a schoolboy’s arm—I almost fainted, had smelling salts. The pale, rather excellent little professorial man who was trying out new springs in the machine, hung round about. Rose tattoos, eagle tattoos spin in my head—we’ll go back. Life begins to justify itself—bit by bit—slowly I’ll build it.
Saturday, September 27.… We stayed in writing, consolidating our splayed selves. I diagnosed, and Ted diagnosed my disease as doldrums—and I feel better, as if I can now start to cope: like a soldier, demobbed, I am cut loose of over twenty steady years of schooling and let free into civilian life—as yet, newly, I hardly know what to do with myself. I start, like a racehorse at the bugle, or whatever, hearing about schools opening—I get weird impulses to rush to Harvard, to Yale, begging them to take me on for a Ph.D., a master’s, anything—only to take my life out of my own clumsy hands. I am going to work, doggedly, all year, at my own pace, being a civilian, thinking, writing, more and more intensely, with more and more purpose, and not merely dreaming, ego-safe, about the magnificent writer I could be. I have worked hard today on my bird story—words come right, rhythms come right, here, there, and it is a beginning of a new life.
Plath took a job working with patients’ records in a Boston mental hospital, which she immediately recognized as a tremendous resource for her work. The patient who felt she might give birth to animals, for instance, appears in “Dark House” from “Poem for a Birthday”:
October 14, Tuesday. A moment snatched, two and a half weeks later, chicken and squash ready in the oven for Ted’s return from the library, back achy, eyes bleary from new job. I went out to three agencies a week ago Monday, got the first job I was interviewed for Tuesday—more hours than I wanted, and low pay, but with compensations of fascinating work and no homework—typing records in the psychiatric clinic at Mass. General, answering phones, meeting and dispatching a staff of over twenty-five doctors and a continual flow of patients—it is exhausting, now I’m new to it, but gives my day and Ted’s an objective structure. Got a rejection of poems I thought a “sure thing” at The New Yorker and haven’t had time or energy to brood—or write! But I figure the job is good for me—all my desires to be analyzed myself, except for occasional brief returns of the panic-bird, are evaporating: paradoxically, my objective daily view of troubled patients through the records objectifies my own view of myself. I shall try to enter into this schedule a wedge of writing—to expand it. I feel my whole sense and understanding of people being deepened and enriched by this: as if I had my wish and opened up the souls of the people in Boston and read them deep. A woman today—fat, fearing death—dreaming of three things, her dead father, her dead friend (dead in childbirth, rheumatic fever), her own funeral—she, in the coffin, and also standing and weeping among the onlookers. Her son falling downstairs and fracturing his skull, drinking poison (DDT)—her mother in the house when it exploded, burning to death. Fear: the main god: fear of elevators, snakes, loneliness—a poem on the faces of fear. Relevant note from Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year:
… it was the opinion of others that it [the plague] might be distinguished by the party’s breathing upon a piece of glass, where, the breath condensing, there might living creatures be seen by a microscope of strange, monstrous and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents and devils, horrible to behold.
“The chaemeras” of the sick mind also.
Twenty-five-year-old twice-married once-divorced mother of three. “I hate my children.” Fear of dark. Sleeps fully dressed.
Job: poultry company. Eviscerator of chickens. Loves job, really loves chickens, can eat them raw. Loves macaroni. Eats 1 lb. dry weight at a time. Constantly asks mother for more food.
Laura R.: Floridly tinted orange hair. Hatcheck girl. Models in nude for photographer. Lesbian girl friend.
Dorothy S.: Nightmares: saw own head amputated but hanging on by skin.
Mary M.: dream: working at bedside of man resembling one of former patients who is middle-aged and has family and who was very friendly to her but not improperly so. In dream, while in bedroom, went to closet and looked into laundry bag and found five heads. Four were those of children she cannot identify. The fifth head was that of her mother as she appeared when patient was a child.
Engaged to a man with a glass eye. 4 years ago: neighbor’s dog in backyard barked at night and not only noise, but population in town was increasing. Owing to efforts of her husband there are no longer any dogs in her town … unable to see insomnia as a result of tensions in herself and continues to blame it on dogs in the neighborhood. (I do feel I have a schizophrenic patient between my hands.)
Spero P.: 34 years old. White, single elementary school principal. Fears asphyxia and death. Inability to maintain intense relationship with a girl when marriage is considered. Intensely absorbed in hatred of mother. Curses her as vain, inhuman, vicious, strict, stubborn, foul old woman who administered inhuman beatings upon him when young. Fear of own impotence. States he can excel at anything and can prove it to anyone. Can annihilate anyone in argument.
Edward C.: Episodic attacks in which he doesn’t feel himself. During attacks feels sense of unreality. When he watches TV he feels he is the one who is creating everything. Once a hurricane came and when the hurricane was over he felt it was he who had created the hurricane and all the damage that was done.
Barbara H.: Felt something moving in her stomach. Might turn to animal or be pregnant, and have puppies. Turn into mule or horse. Thought she was growing hair on face. 35, married, white.
Everything has to be perfect with Philomena T.: While making a cake found she’d left out one ingredient. Went crazy, pulling hair, banging fist, smashing hands against the wall.
Lillian J.: 68-year-old woman. Fascinating obsessional thought she’s pregnant. Boyfriend (52) for last 30 years. Won’t marry him. Sex play. Husband (first) died after 6 years marriage of TB. 11 room rooming house.
Edson F.: Large plot going on. Raped in his sleep—“They put me to stud.” Produces a number of documents to indicate his existence. Birth certificate. Poll tax papers and naturalization papers.
John M.: Machinist. Newton Ball Bearing Co. Engineer, New England City Ice Co. Exterminator. Nightmare: grain of sand rested on chest, would increase in size to that of a house: sensation of smothering, being crushed.
Frank S.: “I feel guilty over my ‘social malevolences.’ ” Dates onset of illness from reading of The Rebel by Camus. Feels he has significantly hurt emotionally vulnerable people by threatening and disdainful looks. In Germany felt desire to hurt or punish German people. Did this by threatening looks at passersby. During this time felt personality more magnetic and powerful than that of most people.
Readers of Letters Home, Plath’s letters to her mother, know that theirs was an extremely close and involved relationship. As Aurelia Plath notes, Sylvia often fused her life with her mother’s. They had a symbiotic, deeply supportive union of great complexity in which it may not always have been easy to feel a separate person, an individual self. After Sylvia’s marriage, there was a similar dependency on her husband—“it’s rather as if neither of us, or especially myself, had any skin, or one skin between us.” The constant struggle she had as an artist—to pass beyond the demons of fear and emptiness, to feel an authentic self, to reach her own power—required breaking out of the symbiosis, rejecting the amnesiac feeling of dissociated rage and thereby shattering the bell jar. The staggering guilt she felt over previous attempts in this direction was magically dissipated by Dr. Ruth Beuscher,* her old therapist, whom she began seeing again in Boston at this time, unbeknownst to both her husband and her mother. “It makes me feel good as hell to express my hostility for my mother, frees me from the Panic Bird on my heart and my typewriter (why?)” The effect of this therapy was extraordinary—it gave rise to her first major work several months later: “Poem for a Birthday.”
Much of the material in these pages relating to Sylvia Plath’s therapy is of course very painful to me, and coming to the decision to approve its release has been difficult. I have no doubt that many readers will accept whatever negative thoughts she reveals here as the whole and absolute truth, despite their cancellation on other, more positive pages. In any case, the importance of this material to Sylvia Plath’s work is certain, and in the interest of furthering understanding of her emotional situation, I have given my consent to the release of this material.
Aurelia Plath
Friday, December 12th. If I am going to pay money for her time & brain as if I were going to a supervision in life & emotions & what to do with both, I am going to work like hell, question, probe sludge & crap & allow myself to get the most out of it.
Ever since Wednesday I have been feeling like a “new person.” Like a shot of brandy went home, a sniff of cocaine, hit me where I live and I am alive and so-there. Better than shock treatment: “I give you permission to hate your mother.”
… So I feel terrific. In a smarmy matriarchy of togetherness it is hard to get a sanction to hate one’s mother especially a sanction one believes in. I believe in R.B. because she is a clever woman who knows her business & I admire her. She is for me “a permissive mother figure.” I can tell her anything, and she won’t turn a hair or scold or withhold her listening, which is a pleasant substitute for love.
But although it makes me feel good as hell to express my hostility for my mother, frees me from the Panic Bird on my heart and my typewriter (why?), I can’t go through life calling Dr. Beuscher up from Paris, London, the wilds of Maine long-distance. [Omission.] Life was hell. She [Sylvia’s mother] had to work. Work, and be a mother, too, a man and a woman in one sweet ulcerous ball. She pinched. Scraped. Wore the same old coat. But the children had new school clothes and shoes that fit. Piano lessons, viola lessons, French horn lessons. They went to Scouts. They went to summer camp and learned to sail. One of them went to private school on scholarship and got good marks. In all honesty and with her whole unhappy heart she worked to give those two innocent little children the world of joy she’d never had. She’d had a lousy world. But they went to college, the best in the nation, on scholarship and work and part of her money, and didn’t have to study nasty business subjects. One day they would marry for love love love and have plenty of money and everything would be honey sweet. They wouldn’t even have to support her in her old age.
The little white house on the corner with a family full of women. So many women, the house stank of them. The grandfather lived and worked at the country club, but the grandmother stayed home and cooked like a grandmother should. The father dead and rotten in the grave he barely paid for, and the mother working for bread like no poor woman should have to and being a good mother on top of it. The brother away at private school and the sister going to public school because there there were men (but nobody liked her until she was sweet sixteen) and she wanted to: she always did what she wanted to. A stink of women: Lysol, cologne, rose water and glycerine, cocoa butter on the nipples so they won’t crack, lipstick red on all three mouths.
Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight.… the only man who’d love me steady through life: she came in one morning with tears … in her eyes and told me he was gone for good. I hate her for that.
[Omission.] He was an ogre. But I miss him. He was old, but she married an old man to be my father. It was her fault. [Omission.]
I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then showed them they hadn’t a chance. I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth pangs. They could gamble while a woman skimped on the butter on the bread. Men, nasty lousy men. They took all they could get and then had temper tantrums or died or went to Spain like Mrs. So-and-so’s husband with his lusty lips.
Get a nice little, safe little, sweet little loving little imitation man who’ll give you babies and bread and a secure roof and a green lawn and money money money every month. Compromise. A smart girl can’t have everything she wants. Take second best. Take anything nice you think you can manage and sweetly master. Don’t let him get mad or die or go to Paris with his sexy secretary. Be sure he’s nice nice nice. [Omission.]
So what does [Mother] know about love? Nothing. You should have it. You should get it. It’s nice. But what is it?
Well, somebody makes you feel Secure. House, money, babies: all the old anchors. A Steady Job. Insurance against acts of god, madmen, burglars, murderers, cancer. Her mother died of cancer. Her daughter tried to kill herself [omission]…. She didn’t have enough insurance. Something Went Wrong. How could the fates punish her so if she was so very noble and good?
It was her daughter’s fault partly. She had a dream: her daughter was all gaudy-dressed about to go out and be a chorus girl, a prostitute too, probably. [Omission.] The husband, brought alive in dream to relive the curse of his old angers, slammed out of the house in rage that the daughter was going to be a chorus girl. The poor Mother runs along the sand beach, her feet sinking in the sand of life, her money bag open and the money and coins falling into the sand, turning to sand. The father had driven, in a fury, to spite her, off the road bridge and was floating dead, face down and bloated, in the slosh of ocean water by the pillars of the country club. Everybody was looking down from the pier at them. Everyone knew everything.
She gave her daughter books by noble women called The Case for Chastity. She told her any man who was worth his salt cared for a woman to be a virgin if she were to be his wife, no matter how many crops of wild oats he’d sown on his own.
What did her daughter do? She … hugged them and kissed them. Turned down the nicest boys whom she would have married like a shot & got older and still didn’t marry anybody. She was too sharp and smart-tongued for any nice man to stand. Oh, she was a cross to bear.
Now this is what I feel my mother felt. I feel her apprehension, her anger.… I feel … only the Idea of Love, and that she thinks she loves me like she should do. She’d do anything for me, wouldn’t she?
I have done practically everything she said I couldn’t do and be happy at the same time and here I am, almost happy.
Except when I feel guilty, feel I shouldn’t be happy, because I’m [not] doing what all the mother figuresa in my life would have me do. I hate them then. I get very sad about not doing what everybody and all my white-haired old mothers want in their old age. [Omission.]
I felt cheated: I wasn’t loved, but all the signs said I was loved: the world said I was loved: the powers-that-were said I was loved. My mother had sacrificed her life for me. A sacrifice I didn’t want.… I made her sign a promise she’d never marry. When [I was nine.] Too bad she didn’t break it.…
She is worried about me and the man I married. How awful we are, to make her worry. We had good jobs and were earning between us about six thousand a year. My god. And we deliberately and with full possession of our senses threw these jobs (and no doubt our careers as teachers) over to live without lifting a finger. Writing. What would we do: next year, twenty years from now: when the babies came? We got reoffered the jobs (lucky the colleges weren’t perfectly furious with us and banging the doors shut) and turned them down again! We were crazy one way or another. What would the aunts and uncles say? What would the neighbors say? [Omission.]
The Man: R.B. says: “Would you have the guts to admit you’d made a wrong choice?” In a husband. I would. But nothing in me gets scared or worried at this question. I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease.… What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don’t want to look around anymore: I don’t need to look around for anything. [Omission.]
So he has all I could ask for. I could have had money and men with steady jobs. But they were dull, or sick, or vain, or spoiled. They made me gag in the long run. What I wanted was inside a person that made you perfectly happy with them if you were naked on the Sahara: they were strong and loving in soul and body. Simple and tough.
So I knew what I wanted when I saw it. I needed, after thirteen long years of having no man who could take all my love and give me a steady flow of love in return, a man who would make a perfect circuit of love and all else with me. I found one. I didn’t have to compromise and accept a sweet balding insurance salesman or an impotent teacher or a dumb conceited doctor [omission]…. I did what I felt the one thing and married the man I felt [was] the only man I could love, and want to see, do what he wanted in this world, and want to cook for and bear children for and write with. [Omission.] And I was, to all appearances, happy with him, Mother thought.
[Omission.] How can I be happy when I did something so dangerous as to follow my own heart and mind regardless of her experienced advice and Mary Ellen Chase’s disapproval and the pragmatic American world’s cold eye: but what does he do for a living? He lives, people. That’s what he does.
Very few people do this anymore. It’s too risky. First of all, it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all. Or to give your soul to god like St. Therese and say: the one thing I fear is doing my own will. Do it for me, God.
There are problems and questions which rise to the surface out of this.
Mother: What to do with your hate for … all mother figures? What to do when you feel guilty for not doing what they say, because, after all, they have gone out of their way to help you?…
… R.B. won’t tell me what to do: she’ll help me find out and learn what is in myself and what I (not she) can best do with it. [Omission.]
Writing: My chain of fear-logic goes like this: I want to write stories and poems and a novel and be Ted’s wife and a mother to our babies. I want Ted to write as he wants and live where he wants and be my husband and a father to our babies.
We can’t now and maybe never will earn a living by our writing, which is the one profession we want. What will we do for money without sacrificing our energy and time to it and hurting our work? Then, worst:
What if our work isn’t good enough? We get rejections. Isn’t this the world’s telling us we shouldn’t bother to be writers? How can we know if we work hard now and develop ourselves we will be more than mediocre? Isn’t this the world’s revenge on us for sticking our neck out? We can never know until we’ve worked, written. We have no guarantee we’ll get a Writer’s Degree. Weren’t the mothers and businessmen right after all? Shouldn’t we have avoided these disquieting questions and taken steady jobs and secured a good future for the kiddies?
Not unless we want to be bitter all our lives. Not unless we want to feel wistfully: What a writer I might have been, if only. If only I’d had the guts to try and work and shoulder the insecurity all that trial and work implied.
Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money. Money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter. Not that you don’t want it. It is only too lovely when a profession pays for your bread and butter. With writing, it is maybe, maybe-not. How to live with such insecurity? With what is worst, the occasional lack or loss of faith in the writing itself? How to live with these things?
The worst thing, worse than all of them, would be to live with not writing. So how to live with the lesser devils and keep them lesser?
Miscellanea: “Does Ted want you to get better?” Yes. He does. He wants me to see Dr. B. and is excited about my upswing in emotion and joy. He wants me to fight my devils with the best weapons I can muster and to win.
R.B. says: There is a difference between dissatisfaction with yourself and anger, depression. You can be dissatisfied and do something about it: if you don’t know German, you can learn it. If you haven’t worked at writing, you can work at it. If you are angry at someone else, and repress it, you get depressed. Who am I angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is [omission] … all the mothers I have known who have wanted me to be what I have not felt like really being from my heart and at the society which seems to want us to be what we do not want to be from our hearts: I am angry at these people and images.
I do not seem to be able to live up to them. Because I don’t want to.
What do they seem to want? Concern with a steady job that earns money, cars, good schools, TV, iceboxes and dishwashers and security First. With us these things are nice enough, but they come second. Yet we are scared. We do need money to eat and have a place to live and children, and writing may never and doesn’t now give us enough. Society sticks its so-there tongue out at us.
Why don’t we teach, like most writers? It seems teaching takes all our time and energy. We didn’t do a thing teaching last year. Satisfaction with passive explication of the great works. Kills and drys one out. Makes everything seem explainable.
Main Questions:
[Omission.]
What to do for money & where to live: practical.
What to do with fear of writing: why fear? Fear of not being a success? Fear of world casually saying we’re wrong in rejections?
Ideas of maleness: conservation of creative power (sex & writing).
Why do I freeze in fear my mind & writing: say, look: no head, what can you expect of a girl with no head?
Why don’t I write a novel? [I have! August 22, 1961: The Bell Jar.]b
Images of society: the Writer and Poet is excusable only if he is Successful. Makes Money.
Why do I feel I should have a Ph.D., that I am aimless, brainless without one, when I know what is inside is the only credential necessary for my identity?
NB: I do not hit often: once or twice.
How to express anger creatively?
Fear of losing male totem: what roots?
R.B.: You have always been afraid of premature choices cutting off other choices. [Omission.]
Saturday morning, December 13. So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Learn how the leaves grow on the trees. Open your eyes. The thin new moon is on its back over the Green Cities’ Service cloverleaf and the lit brick hills of Watertown, God’s luminous fingernail, a shut angel’s eyelid. Learn how the moon goes down in the night frost before Christmas. Open your nostrils. Smell snow. Let life happen.
Never felt guilty for bedding with one, losing virginity and going to the Emergency Ward in a spurt spurt of blood, playing with this one and that. Why? Why? I didn’t have an idea, I had feelings. I had feelings and found out what I wanted and found the one only I wanted and knew it not with my head but with the heat of rightness, salt-sharp and sure as mice in cheese.
Graphic story: the deflowering. What it is like? Welcome of pain, experience. Phone call. Pay bill.
Seen on walk down Atlantic Avenue: a black hearse rounding the corner by the coffeehouse in a cinder-block garage under a corrugated tin roof. Velvet curtains like at the opera, and patent-leather black as Lothario’s dancing shoe. Among the ten-ton trucks by the railroad station, this suave funeral parlor sedan, greased and groomed. Why, whereto? We walked, and the trucks rattled by, grazing our flanks. Across the street the hearse had stopped, drawn up back to the open door of the railway express shed. Men in black coats and derbies were sliding a redwood coffin off the rollers into the shed. Heavy, heavy. We stopped, stared, fingers freezing in our gloves, our breath spelling Indian puffs on the gray still deathly air. One black-coated man wore the permanent expression of grief stony on his face, an out-of-work actor perpetually reliving the role where he bursts in and tells that the brave army is cut to bits, that little Eyolf is gone after the rat wife and nothing but his crutch is left on the water to cross his wet bed. Gray hair, a long vein-mottled face, hollow eye sockets and fixed Greek-tragedy eyes and a mouth-mask of absolute misery: but static, frozen. He helps a red-faced, round-cheeked cherry-nosed man, whose face would break into smiles if his black coat and round topped black hat didn’t keep him solemn as the job requires in the eyes of the watching public. We watched. The reddened rich-wood coffin slid into a packing crate of pale wood on a suitcase and trunk trolley. The packing crate had copper fluted handles on either side. A square wood lid fitted over the gap the coffin entered and tightened snugly with copper wing nuts like shiny butterflies. The round-faced man climbed on top of the packing crate and laboriously penciled some directives on the top: Christmas mail to somebody out West. Fragile: Perishable Goods: Handle with Care: Headside Up: Keep in a Cool, Dry Place. Whose body? Somebody bumped off? Some husband, father, lover, whore? The last Dickensians. The last caricaturers of grief, whose faces never alter from the one grimace. They sell their fixed selves like a commodity of great value to the legions of the bereaved, whisper, console, condole: “At a time like this, nothing but the best.” …
A gay incursion: looking out the window for the mailman: can see, over the second cup of coffee, his brass buttons and round blue hat and blue-clad paunch. Can see his bulging brown leather mail satchel, scratched and blotched by the variable Boston weathers. Ran down in the elevator. A thin airmail letter after a fall of rejection for Saxton fellowship, Harper’s rejection, Encounter rejection, Atlantic rejection, and book rejection from the World Publishing Company. An acceptance of three poems with a charming warm admiring letter from John Lehmann.c “Lorelei,” “The Disquieting Muses,” “The Snakecharmer”: all my romantic lyricals. I knew his taste. How nice, how fine. That crack of courage. That foothold. And the sense to know I must change, be careless, deep in my writing.…
I may have a baby someday: I feel quite smiley about it. Where has the old scare gone? I still feel a deep awe of the pain. Will I live to tell of it?
Work. Work. Hysterical teary-bright call from mother.… My heart aches, dull, frozen [omission]…. Why should I the naughty one be happy? I am. She begged us to “come and live in her house for a while if we wanted a change.” She wants to make the most of us, after all she feels, fears, we may go away at any minute.
Tuesday morning, December 16. Nine thirtyish: have rewritten and rewritten “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” and am going to start sending it out now. I think I can bear up under rejections: hope only that I get letters of commentary. I want it to go about. It’s so queer and quite slangy that I think it may have a chance somewhere. Will send it out 10 times before I get sorry: by then, I should have two or three more stories.…
Have been happier this week than for six months. It is as if R.B., saying “I give you permission to hate your mother,” also said, “I give you permission to be happy.” Why the connection? Is it dangerous to be happy? [Omission.] I am enjoying myself with a great lessening of worry: the dregs of dissatisfaction with myself: not writing enough, not working hard, not reading hard, studying German—are things I can do if I want & will do. It is the hate, the paralyzing fear, that gets in my way and stops me. Once that is worked clear of, I will flow. My life may at last get into my writing. As it did in the Johnny Panic story.
Got an old New World Writing, Frank O’Connor’s stories, and three Ionesco plays yesterday on our walk out. O’Connor’s stories an inspiration of technique; “sure things.” I feel it is as important to read what is being written now, good things (Herb Gold is good), to get out of my old-fashioned classroom idiom: She felt, she said. Prim, prim. Read “Amedee” and laughed aloud. The growing corpse: the mushrooms: met with by all the petty-bourgeous platitudes usually used up on trivia. The accepting [of] the horrific and ridiculous as if it were the daily newspaper delivery. Is it to say that platitudes take the edge off our real horrors so that we are all blinded to them, our corpses and poisonous mushrooms?
Truman Capote this weekend: a baby-boy, must be in his middle thirties. Big head, as of a prematurely delivered baby, an embryo, big white forehead, little drawstring mouth, shock of blond hair, mincy skippy fairy body in black jacket, velvet or corduroy, couldn’t tell from where we sat.… Men hated the homosexual part of him with more than usual fury. Something else: jealousy at his success? If he weren’t successful there would be nothing to anger at. I was very amused, very moved, only Holiday [sic] Golightly left me more chilly than when I read her.…
Wednesday A.M., December 17. A Ladies’ Home Journal story, “The Button Quarrel”? Ask Dr. B. about psychological need to fight, express hostility between husband & wife. A story of an “advanced” couple, no children, woman with career, above sewing on buttons, cooking. The husband thinks he agrees, fight over sewing on buttons. Not really fight about that. Fight about his deep-rooted conventional ideas of womanhood, like all the rest of the men, wants them pregnant and in the kitchen. Wants to shame her in public; told from point of view of wise elderly matron? advice? ah, what is it.
Angry at R.B. for changing appointment to tomorrow. Shall I tell her? Makes me feel: she does it because I am not paying money. She does it and is symbolically withholding herself, breaking a “promise,” like Mother not loving me, breaking her “promise” of being a loving mother each time I speak to her or talk to her. That she shifts me about because she knows I’ll agree nicely & take it, and that it implies I can be conveniently manipulated. A sense of my insecurity with her accentuated by floating, changeable hours and places. The question: is she trying to do this, or aware of how I might feel about it, or simply practically arranging appointments?
A tirade with Ted over Jane Truslow,d “You know her,” “How can I be expected to know which one?” and buttons, his telling Marcia and Mike that I: hide shirts, rip up torn socks, never sew on buttons. His motive: I thought that would make you do it. So he thought by shaming me, he could manipulate me. My reaction: a greater stubbornness than ever, just as his reaction is when I try to manipulate him into doing something, ergo, changing seats at Truman Capote. It would have been better looking-at-Capote to change seats, it would be better wearing-shirts-and-coats for Ted for me to sew on his buttons: what makes, or made, both acts impossible was the sense that the other was putting more in his decision than the act itself: it was a victory one over the other, not an issue of theater seats and buttons. I face this. I feel to know it. But he doesn’t. Just as he tells me, when he wants to manipulate me one way (e.g., to stop “nagging,” which means talking about anything he doesn’t like), that I am like my mother, which is sure to get an emotional reaction, even if it’s not true. [Omission.] His surest triumph and easy way to get me to do what he wants is to tell me I’m just-like-my-mother whenever I do or don’t do something he wants. Realizing this is half the battle against it. Will he admit it to himself? I’m just as bad. Dirty hands, dirty hands. [Omission.]
Friday morning, December 26, 1958. About to see Dr. B. A cold after-Christmas morning. A good Christmas. Because, Ted says, I was merry. I played, teased, welcomed Mother. I may hate her, but that’s not all. I … love her too. After all, as the story goes, she’s my mother. “She can’t encroach unless you’re encroachable on.” So my hate and fear derive from my own insecurity. Which is? And how to combat it?
Fear of making early choices which close off alternatives. Not afraid of marrying Ted, because he is flexible, won’t shut me in. Problem: we both want to write, have a year. Then what? Not odd jobs. A steady money-earning profession: psychology?
How to develop my independence? Not tell him everything. Hard, seeing him all the time, not leading outer life.
Fear: access after seeing people at Harvard: feeling I’ve put myself out of the running. Why can’t I throw myself into writing? Because I am afraid of failure before I begin.
Old need of giving Mother accomplishments, getting reward of love.
I do fight with Ted: two acrid fights. The real reasons: we both worry about money: we have enough till next September 1st. Then what? How to keep concerns about money and profession from destroying the year we have?
Neither of us wants a job connected with English: not magazine, publishing, newspaper or teaching: not now, teaching.
Problem of Ted and America. He doesn’t see how to use it yet. I feel his depression. Don’t want to force or manipulate him into anything he doesn’t want. Yet he worries too, only is not articulate about it.
Don’t know where we want to live. What profession we will work into. How much to count on writing. Poetry unlucrative. Maybe children’s books.
Ted: steady, kind, loving, warm, intelligent, creative. But we are both too ingrown: prefer books too often to people. Anti-security compulsion.…
If I can build myself and my work I will be a contribution to our pair, not a dependent and weak half.
Hate of mother, jealousy of brother: only when I am dubious of the way of life to substitute into the place of the life they seem to favor. They will accept it, but we must be sure of our way. We are not; I am not. Discouragement about work. Haven’t really worked at writing. Fear of aimless intellectual frittering. Need for a profession dealing with people on a level not superficial.
Jealousy over men: why jealous of Ted? Mother can’t take him. Other women can. I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can’t be attacked.
Saturday, December 27, 1958. Yesterday had a session with R.B., quite long, and very deep. I dug up things which hurt and made me cry. Why do I cry with her and only with her? I am experiencing a grief reaction for [the loss of] Mother’s love. [Omission.] What, then, do I expect in the way of love? Do I feel what I expect when I see R.B.? Is that why I cry? Because even her professional kindness strikes me as more to what I want than what I feel in Mother? I have lost a father and his love early; feel angry at her because of this and feel she feels I killed him (her dream about me being a chorus girl and his driving off and drowning himself). I dreamed often of losing her, and these childhood nightmares stand out: I dreamed the other night of running after Ted through a huge hospital, knowing he was with another woman, going into mad wards and looking for him everywhere: what makes you think it was Ted? It had his face but it was my father, my mother.
I identify him with my father at certain times, and these times take on great importance: e.g., that one fight at the end of the school year when I found him not-there on the special day and with another woman. I had a furious access of rage. He knew how I love him and felt, and yet wasn’t there. Isn’t this an image of what I feel my father did to me? I think it may be. The reason I haven’t discussed it with Ted is that the situation hasn’t come up again and it is not a characteristic of his: if it were, I would feel wronged in my trust on him. It was an incident only that drew forth echoes, not the complete withdrawal of my father, who deserted me forever. Ask: why didn’t I talk about it afterwards? Is this a plausible interpretation? If it had come up since, it would be recollected by the stir-up of similar incidents and fears. Ted, insofar as he is a male presence, is a substitute for my father: but in no other way. Images of his faithlessness with women echo my fear of my father’s relation with my mother and Lady Death.
How fascinating all this is. Why can’t I master it and manipulate it and lose my superficiality, which is a careful protective gloss against it?
Read Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia this morning after Ted left for the library. An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself: the “vampire” metaphor Freud uses, “draining the ego”: that is exactly the feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: Mother’s clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hate of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions in myself until it becomes very difficult to distinguish what is really bogus criticism from what is really a changeable liability. How can I get rid of this depression: by refusing to believe she has any power over me, like the old witches for whom one sets out plates of milk and honey. This is not easily done. How is it done? Talking and becoming aware of what is what and studying it is a help.
Dr. B.: You are trying to do two mutually incompatible things this year. 1) spite your mother. 2) write. To spite your mother, you don’t write because you feel you have to give the stories to her, or that she will appropriate them. (As I was afraid of having her around to appropriate my baby, because I didn’t want it to be hers.) So I can’t write. And I hate her because my not writing plays into her hands and argues that she is right, I was foolish not to teach, or do something secure, when what I have renounced security for is nonexistent. My rejection-fear is bound up with the fear that this will mean my rejection by her, for not succeeding: perhaps that is why they are so terrible. The saving thing is, Ted doesn’t care about the rejections except insofar as they bother me. So my work is to have fun in my work and to FEEL THAT MY WORKS ARE MINE. She may use them, put them about her room when published, but I did them and she has nothing to do with them.
It is not that I myself do not want to succeed. I do. But I do not need success with the desperation I have felt for it: that is an infusion of fear that successlessness means no approval from Mother: and approval, with Mother, has been equated for me with love, however true that is.
[Omission.] WHAT DO I EXPECT BY “LOVE” FROM HER? WHAT IS IT I DON’T GET THAT MAKES ME CRY? I think I have always felt she uses me as an extension of herself; that when I commit suicide, or try to, it is a “shame” to her, an accusation: which it was, of course. An accusation that her love was defective. Feeling, too, of competing with Warren: the looming image of Harvard is equated with him. How, by the way, does Mother understand my committing suicide? As a result of my not writing, no doubt. I felt I couldn’t write because she would appropriate it. Is that all? I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing and love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
When I am cured of my witch-belief, I will be able to tell her of writing without a flinch and still feel it mine. She is … Not a witch. [Omission.]
Is our desire to investigate psychology a desire to get Dr. B.’s power and handle it ourselves? It is an exciting and helpful power. “You are never the same afterwards: it is a Pandora’s box: nothing is simple anymore.”
MY WRITING IS MY WRITING IS MY WRITING. Whatever elements there were in it of getting her approval I must no longer use it for that. I must not expect her love for it. [Omission.] I must change, not she. Why is telling her of a success so unsatisfying: because one success is never enough: when you love, you have an indefinite lease of it. When you approve, you only approve single acts. Thus approval has a short dateline. The question is: so much for that, good, but now, what is the next thing?
WHAT DO I FEEL GUILTY ABOUT? Having a man, being happy.… [Omission.]
One reason I could keep up such a satisfactory letter-relationship with her while in England was we could both verbalize our desired image of ourselves in relation to each other: interest and sincere love, and never feel the emotional currents at war with these verbally expressed feelings. I feel her disapproval. But I feel it countries away too. [Omission.] I wish … I could be sure of what I am: so I could know that what feelings I have, even though some resemble hers, are really my own. Now I find it hard to distinguish between the semblance and the reality. [Omission.]
One reason all people at Harvard are a reproach to me and make me jealous: because I identify them with Warren? How to stop this.
PROBLEM: The same act may be good or not good depending on its emotional content. Such as coitus. Such as giving presents. Such as choosing a job.
WHAT IS THE MATURE THING TO DO WITH [HOSTILITY] FOR MOTHER? Does the need to express it recede with a mature awareness? [Omission.] Does all hate pass off …?
Ted & I are introverts and need a kind of external stimulus such as a job to get us into deep contact with people: even in superficial contact such as smalltalk which is pleasurable.… Writing as a profession turns us inward: we don’t do reportage, criticism, freelance research. Poetry is the most ingrown and intense of the creative arts. Not much money in it, and that windfalls. Teaching is another distortion: it selects an abstract subject, a subject “about reality, spiritual and physical,” organizes it into courses, simplifies the deluge of literature by time divisions and subject divisions and style divisions. Makes organized a small bit of it all and repeats that for twenty years. Psychology, I imagine, supplies more reality situations: the people you deal with are bothered with a variety of things, people and ideas, not just the symbolism of James Joyce. They have different jobs; different things are good for them. They do not take the Exam of Life together in the same room: each is different. There is no common grade scale. They have common problems but none is exactly the same. This requires an extension of other-awareness. Whatever Ted does, I would like to submit myself to it. It would require a long discipleship. However, I don’t want to enter it until I have convinced myself I am writing and writing for my own pleasure and to express insights to others also, and learning techniques.
Ted and I talked about jobs yesterday: He is as pathological as I am in his own way: compulsive against society so he envisions “getting a job” as a kind of prison term. Yet says now his job at Cambridge was a rich experience which he then took as death. I would be pleased if he found something that he liked. What is so terrible about earning a regular wage? He admits it feels good. He is afraid of the Image: so many have regular jobs and are dead, why wouldn’t it kill him? If he has his writing established in this year, I don’t think it would kill him. But he doesn’t want the sort of job, no more do I, that I/he could walk into without much preparation; a job to do with writing.
We agreed on a Friday afternoon blow-up: all problems and not only that, but praise: counting week’s good things. Projecting constructive things for the next week.… We read over an hour of King Lear over tea. I read four Ionesco plays: The Bald Soprano, Jack, The Lesson, The Chairs: terrifying and funny: playing on our own old conventions and banalities and making them carried to the last extreme to show, by the discrepancy between real and real-to-the-last-thrust, how funny we are and how far gone. “We eat well because we live in a suburb of London and our name is Smith.” A family crisis: a boy won’t submit and say he adores hashed brown potatoes: the smallness of the object contrasted with the totality of emotion involved on all sides: a ridicule, a terror. Now all I need to do is start writing without thinking it’s for Mother to get affection from her! How can I do this: where is my purity of motive? Ted won’t need to get out of the house when I’m sure I’m not using his writing to get approval too and sure I’m myself and not him.
Reason I want R.B. to talk first? Desire not to have responsibility of analysis rest on me? I want to ask questions & will: it is my work and my advantage to work on it. Immense peace today after talk with her, deep grief expression: when will that last end?
Sunday, December 28. Before nine. Oatmeal eater, and two cups of coffee. Had my coffee vision in bed. Began clearly to remember Dick Norton. A possible theme: virgin girl brought up in idealism expects virginity from boy her family raves about as pure. He is going to be a doctor, a pillar of society; he is already swinging toward conventionalism. Takes her through lectures on sickle-cell anemia, moon-faced babies in jars, cadavers, baby born. She doesn’t flinch. What she flinches at is his affair with a waitress. She hates him for it. Jealous. Sees no reason for being a virgin herself. What’s the point in being a virgin? Argument with him: humor. She won’t marry him. What are her motives? He is a hypocrite. “Well, should I go around telling folks?” Kiss the earth and beg pardon. No, that wouldn’t be enough. The modern woman: demands as much experience as the modern man.…
Went to library yesterday afternoon with Ted. Looked up requirements for a Ph.D. in psychology. It would take about six years. A prodigious prospect. Two years for prerequisites, languages for M.A. Four years for the rest, it might be three. The work of applying, figuring out programs, etc., and not to mention money, a formidable thing. Awesome to confront a program of study which is so monumental: all human experience. Still, it was good to face what it would mean. I wonder if the statistics would overwhelm me.
Turn, with a kind of relief, to the business of learning a craft. I am reading Frank O’Connor’s stories not just with the first innocence, letting it come at me, but with a kind of growing awareness of what he is doing technically. I will imitate until I can feel I’m using what he can teach. His stories are so clearly “constructed”: not a whit unused: a narrative flow. That is what I most need and most miss. I write a sort of imagey, static prose: like the tattoo story: I understand for the first time why he didn’t accept me for his course with my Minton story: I should have sent “The Perfect Setup” or the sorority story. They had plot, people changing, learning something. My trouble with Johanna Bean is that I have about three themes, none clear.
I am still dallying a good two hours too much before working: sewing on The Button, making a bed, watering a plant. Still sick on waking and will be till the story is more interesting than my own self-musings.
Ted read my signature on the letter to his parents as “woe” instead of “love.” He was right, it looked surprising: the left hand knows not what the right writes. It would make me quite happy if he would find some steady something he liked to do. Dick Norton’s mother was not so wrong about a man supplying direction and a woman the warm emotional power of faith and love. I feel we are as yet directionless (not inside, so much as in a peopled community way—we belong nowhere because we have not given of ourselves to any place wholeheartedly, not committed ourselves).
Ted labored all yesterday afternoon and evening making a wolf-mask out of Agatha’s old, falling-apart sealskin. It is remarkably fuzzy and wolfish. About the party tonight: the sense of not wanting to go: the Unknown, everybody buying fabulous costumes and toys to go with them. I haven’t even got a red hood or a basket, which is all I need, but can’t see spending even a couple of $$/
Am reading Saint Thérèse’s autobiography: a terror of the contradiction of “relic and pomp admiration” and the pure soul. Where, where is Jesus? Maybe only the nuns and monks come near, but even they have this horrid self-satisfied greed for misfortune which in its own way is [as] perverse as greed for happiness in this world: such as T.’s “precious blessing” of her father’s cerebral paralysis and madness: a welcome cross to bear!
The only way to stop envying others is to have a self of joy. All creation is jammed in the selfish soul.
I think I am pregnant: I wonder when and if I will feel it.
Saturday, January 3, 1959. As usual after an hour with Dr. B., digging, felt I’d been watching or participating in a Greek play: a cleansing and an exhaustion. I wish I could keep the revelations, such as they are, fresh in mind. Relieved she suggested $5 for an hour. Enough, considerable for me. Yet not outrageous, so it is punishment. Felt brief panic at the thought she would not take me on or try to refer me to someone else.
All my life I have been “stood up” emotionally by the people I loved most: Daddy dying and leaving me, Mother somehow not there. So I endow the smallest incidents of lateness, for example, in other people I love, with an emotional content of coldness, indication that I am not important to them. Realizing this, I wasn’t angry or bothered she was late. The terror of my last day of teaching last May, when this happened, especially with the face of that girl. If it happened more often, I would find it a character fault, but it doesn’t seem to have happened.
Twister: I don’t care if T. gives me presents as proof of my affection. What comes to mind? Hugging. I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I gave. She [Dr. B.] said well: so you wouldn’t be left on a limb with your love hanging out. Afraid of having love all unaccepted, left over. Shame at this.
At McLeane I had an inner life going on all the time but wouldn’t admit it. If I had known this, I would have praised the Lord. I needed permission to admit I lived. Why?
Why, after the “amazingly short” three or so shock treatments, did I rocket uphill? Why did I feel I needed to be punished, to punish myself. Why do I feel now I should be guilty, unhappy: and feel guilty if I am not? Why do I feel immediately happy after talking to Dr. B.? Able to enjoy every little thing: shopped for meat, a victory for me, and got what I wanted: veal, chicken, hamburg. My need to punish myself might, horribly, go to the length of deliberately and to spite my face disappointing T. in this way or that. That would be my worst punishment. That and not writing. Knowing this is the first guard against it.
What do I expect or want from Mother? Hugging, mother’s milk? But that is impossible to all of us now. Why should I want it still? What can I do with this want? How can I transfer it to something I can have?
A great, stark, bloody play acting itself out over and over again behind the sunny facade of our daily rituals, birth, marriage, death, behind parents and schools and beds and tables of food: the dark, cruel, murderous shades, the demon-animals, the Hungers.
Attitude to things: like a mother, I don’t want anyone to say anything against T., not that he is lazy or shiftless: I know he works, and hard, but it doesn’t show to the observer, for whom writing is sitting home, drinking coffee and piddling about. A play.
ASK ABOUT MOTHER-LOVE: Why these feelings? Why guilt: as if sex, even legally indulged in, should be “paid for” by pain? I would probably interpret pain as a judgment: birth-pain, even a deformed child. Magical fear Mother will become a child, my child: an old hag child.
Wednesday, January 7, 1959. The abstract kills, the concrete saves (try inverting this thesis tomorrow). How an Idea of What Should Be or What One Should Be Doing can drive an eating, excreting two-legged beast to misery. How dusting, washing daily dishes, talking to people who are not mad and [who] dust and wash and feel life is as it should be helps.…
Don’t wake up in the morning because I want to go back to the womb. From now on: see if this is possible: set alarm for 7:30 and get up then, tired or not. Rip through breakfast and house-cleaning (bed and dishes, mopping or whatever) by 8:30. Ted got coffee and oatmeal today: he doesn’t like to do it, but does it. I am a fool to let him. Alarm-setting gets over the bother of waking at ragged odd hours around nine.
Be writing before 9, that takes the curse off it. It is now almost 11. I have washed two sweaters, the bathroom floor, mopped, done a day’s dishes, made the bed, folded the laundry and stared in horror at my face: it is a face old before its time.
Nose podgy as a leaking sausage: big pores full of pus and dirt, red blotches, the peculiar brown mole on my under-chin which I would like to have excised. Memory of that girl’s face in the med school movie, with a little black beauty wart: this wart is malignant: she will be dead in a week. Hair untrained, merely brown and childishly put up: don’t know what else to do with it. No bone structure. Body needs a wash, skin the worst: it is this climate: chapping cold, desiccating hot: I need to be tan, all-over brown, and then my skin clears and I am all right. I need to have written a novel, a book of poems, a Ladies’ Home Journal or New Yorker story, and I will be poreless and radiant. My wart will be nonmalignant.
Reading The Horse’s Mouth: hard to get into. I see why it didn’t sell much here: too rich a surface, all knots and spurtings of philosophy, but only as emanation from the bumpy colored surface of life, not imposed on it. Plot not spare and obvious, but a spate of anecdotes. Podgy old Sara eternal as Eve, Alison, Wife of Bath. This old battered hide: needs a brain and a creative verve to make it livable in, a heater in the ratty house.
Read Ainu tales: primitive: all at penis-fetish, anus-fetish, mouth-fetish stage. Marvelous untouched humor, primal: bang, bang you’re dead. Stories of alter ego: same thing done by two people, only one is rich by it, other poor and dead: difference, attitude of mind only. NB.
The first thing is the early rising. Also, telling Ted nothing. DOING. Finished, almost, story of Shadow: no Joanna Bean in it at all. Despair: have ideas: lack of know-how. Also, lack of ideas. How many girls go to sleep on marrying after college: see them twenty-five years later with their dew-eyes turned ice, same look, no growing except in outside accretions, like the shell of a barnacle. Beware.
Thursday, January 8. A poor day again. The old sickness on me and a morning dissipated in phone calls and calculatings with the money down $1,000. A deep wish to leap to Columbia and get a Ph.D. and make money by working. I don’t know if I’m the sort to stay home all day and write. I think my head will get soft if I have no outer walls to measure it against. Or that I will stop speaking the human language.
Very bad dreams lately. One just after my period last week of losing my month-old baby: a transparent meaning. The baby, formed just like a baby, only small as a hand, died in my stomach and fell forward: I looked down at my bare belly and saw the round bump of its head in my right side, bulging out like a burst appendix. It was delivered with little pain, dead. Then I saw two babies, a big nine-month one, and a little one-month one with a blind white-piggish face nuzzling against it: a transfer image, no doubt, from Rosalind’s cat and kittens a few days before: the little baby was a funny shape, like a kitten with white skin instead of fur. But my baby was dead. I think a baby would make me forget myself in a good way. Yet I must find myself.…
Is it a defense, not working: then I can’t be criticized for what I do. Why am I passive? Why don’t I go out and work? I am inherently lazy. Teaching looks a blessed relief after this burden. Anyway, we don’t get out and meet people. Ted stays in and brings in little but books. I am going sloppy. I will wash hair and shower tonight. How to bring my life together in a strong way? Not to wander and squander. So little I know of the world.
Nothing to measure myself against: no community to be part of. Ted refuses any church. Still, why can’t I go alone? Find out and go alone. Other people are a salvation. It is up to me.
Last night’s horror: Stephen Fassettf in it, stiff and sad. Walking by gravestones, dragging them away with a rope: a corridor, with dead corpses being wheeled down it, half decayed, their faces all mottled and falling away, yet clothed in coats, hats, and so on. We got pushed into the stream, and horror, the dead were moving. A dead corpse, all grinning and filth being propelled along standing by another man almost as bad, then a lump of flesh, stunted, round, with black cloves, or nails stuck in all over it, and only one long apish swinging arm, reaching out for alms. I woke screaming: the horror of the deformed and dead, alive as we are, and I among them, in the filth and swarming corruption of the flesh. I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be: why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know: I must sever myself from them, or be part of their world: this half-and-half compromise is intolerable. If only Ted wanted to do something. Saw a career he’d enjoy.… I feel the weight on me. The old misery of money seeping away. A cold corpse between me and any work at all. I need a flow of life on the outside, a child, a job, a community I know from preacher to baker. Not this drift of fairy tales.
Saturday, January 10. Cried yesterday morning: as if it were an hour for keening: why is crying so pleasurable? I feel clean, absolutely purged after it. As if I had a grief to get over with, some deep sorrow. I cried about other mothers coming to take care of their daughters for a while, with babies. Talked of how I could let Mother have her limited pleasure if I were “grown-up” enough not to feel jeopardized by her manipulating me. I sidestepped this problem ingeniously: talked of M. E. Chase, lesbians (what does a woman see in another woman what she doesn’t see in a man: tenderness?). I am also afraid of M.E.C.: you must hate her, fear her: you think all old women are magical witches.
The crux is my desire to be manipulated. Whence does it come, how can I triumph over it? Why is my flow of inner life so blocked? How can I free it? How can I find myself & be sure of my identity?
Next time: start by asking if my stubborn shut-mouth at the beginning is an attempt to force R.B. to talk first, take the running of the hour out of my hands: she won’t talk first, makes me. And I eventually do.
How can I stop fearing other people? How can I know who I am? How to let my native sense of meaning flow and connect with people and the world? Why this sense of horror, coming over me? Fear? If Ted had a positive program, joy in his work—a work that would serve as a connection with people, a place, it would help: while uncommitted, I am faced with dozens of possibilities, places, ways: fear of death by premature choice, cutting off of alternatives. How to say: I choose this, & not fear the consequences.
Rejection of my Johnny Panic story without a note from The Yale Review: all my little dreams of publishing it there vanished: so writing is still used as a proof of my identity. Bitterness at achievement of others.
Glimmer last night of pleasure, which slipped away: Agatha’s top floor room, the gray snow-light of evening coming, the tea, the enclosed feeling of peace, old carpets, old sofa, old smoothed chairs: don’t share sorrow with Ted of rejection: he worries about me, I make up problems. Talk of poetry, cats, Ted reading Smart’s poem on cats. Martini at Marty’s, seeing her print blouse and slacks she is sewing, a real honest wish to make something like that myself. Yet a rebellion at the time on it. Interest in making clothes for children. Why can’t I read Yeats, Hopkins, if I love them. Why do I punish myself by not looking at them? I think I will get a Ph.D. in English & teach poetry.
Talked also with R.B. of Victorian women who fear men: men treat women as brainless chattels: have seen so many romances end in this sort of thing, waste of a woman, they don’t believe marriage can work without woman becoming maid, servant, nurse and losing brain. Ulcers: desire for dependency & feeling it is wrong to be dependent: you reject food (mother’s milk), dependency, and yet get dependency by being sick: it’s the ulcer to blame, not you.
Where is joy? Joy in frogs, not in Idea of people looking at my frog poem. Why must I punish myself, or save myself, by pretending I am stupid and can’t feel? (The damn electrician sounds to be sawing the house in.) Would pregnancy bring a kind of peace? I would, she says, probably have a depression after my first baby if I didn’t get rid of it now.…
Promiscuity: my ingenious, evasive self-deceiving explanation: I had to give out affection in small doses so it would be accepted, not all to one person, who couldn’t take it. Very queer. The fact that belies this is that I found no pleasure in anything except my relation with R., [Richard Sassoon] and that was a monogamous affair for me while it lasted. So I was trying to be like a man: able to take or leave sex, with this one and that. I got even. But really wasn’t meant for it. What about exhibitionism? The whore, a male-type woman? For all comers?
She [Dr. B.] praises me, and I feel hungry for it: I castigate myself so completely. What a mess I am.
To see what to expect from Mother, etc., accept it and know how to deal with it. This presupposes an independence and sense of identity in myself, which I have not got. This is the main issue.…
I have hated men because I felt them physically necessary: hated them because they would degrade me, by their attitude: women shouldn’t think, shouldn’t be unfaithful (but their husbands may be), must stay home, cook, wash. Many men need a woman to be like this. Only the weak ones don’t, so many strong women marry a weak one, to have children, and their own way at once. If I could once see how to write a story, a novel, to get something of my feeling over, I would not despair. If writing is not an outlet, what is?…
Felt a joy yesterday, soon clouded.
Postscript: Am reading the Book of Job: great peace derived therefrom. Shall read the Bible: symbolic meaning, even though the belief in a moral God-structured universe not there. Live As If it were? A great device.
Will not tell Ted of rejection: will not make gloom concrete: that is an indulgence. He gets bothered because I am bothered and then I feel bad for his being bothered and so on. Will just quietly send it out again Monday.…
Wednesday, January 20, 1959. Peculiar peace this morning: all is gray and dripping wet. We have a new cat whose needs and miaows are become a part of consciousness. I tried shutting it in the bedroom, but it cried and cried. It loves human warmth, cries to get in bed with us. A little stary tiger now curled drowsy blue-eyed on the couch. Playful, adventurous, named Sappho.…
A moment with Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell: she charming and high-strung, mimicking their subnormal Irish house girl, whom they have at last let go, he kissing her tenderly before leaving, calling her he would be late, and all the winsome fondnesses of a devoted husband. He with his stories about Dylan Thomas, the two bald men in Iowa, Thomas putting his hands on each head: I can tell the two of you apart because one wears glasses, and one’s a good fellow and the other’s a dry turd. Lowell’s half-whisper and sliding glance. Peter Brooks, his tall wrinkled soft kind charming face, falling here and there, nerves: his iceblue-eyed pouty blond ballerina wife, Gerta K., saying to her [evidently, Hardwick], “Next to me I hear you’re the biggest bitch in Cambridge.” Lowell: “You should tell her: you’re boasting.”
Finished a poem this weekend, “Point Shirley, Revisited,” on my grandmother. Oddly powerful and moving to me in spite of the rigid formal structure. Evocative. Not so one-dimensional. Spent a really pleasant afternoon, rainy, in the library looking up goatsuckers for a poem for Esther’sg night creatures book. Much more than on frogs, and much more congenial a subject. I have eight lines of a sonnet on the bird, very alliterative and colored. The problem this morning is the sestet.
I feel oddly happy. To enjoy the present as if I had never lived and would tomorrow be dead, instead of “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, never jam today.” The secret of peace: a devout worship of the moment. Ironically: with most people this is what comes naturally.…
… I make up problems, all unnecessary. I do not reverence the present time. Tomorrow: Ask R.B. why I need to have a problem. Why she was late. What am I hiding about “other people” to protect myself? Why am I so jealous of others? I am me, and the rain is lovely on these chimneys.…
We decided to live in England. I really want this. Ted will be his best there. I shall demand an icebox and a good dentist, but love it. Hopefully a big sonorous place in the country in easy distance of London, where I may work. I would so much like to. I will read novels by Lessing and Murdoch, also Bianca Van Orden. Sometimes life seems so meanderingly pleasant. And then I castigate myself for laziness. For not working for a Ph.D. or on a third book like A.C.R.h or having four children and a profession, or this, or that. All ridiculous. In worry I do nothing.
Joy: show joy & enjoy: then others will be joyful. Bitterness the one sin. That and the ever-prevalent sloth.
Tuesday, January 27.… A month of the New year evaporated. Read Wilbur and Rich this morning. Wilbur a bland turning of pleasaunces, a fresh speaking and picturing with incalculable grace and all sweet, pure, clear, fabulous, the maestro with the imperceptible marcel. Robert Lowell after this is like good strong shocking brandy after a too lucidly sweet dinner wine, dessert wine.
I speak with Dr. B. of being little, as if I were a homunculus. I made an appointment to cut and permanent my hair yesterday and canceled it. Unable to impose my will and wish on a professional hairdresser.… I’m not working, only studying to change my ways of writing poems. A disgust for my work. My poems begin on one track, in one dimension, and never surprise or shock or even much please. The world is all left out. World’s criticism had a point: too much dreams, shadowy underworlds.
To ask Dr. B. what I can do to sift out grown self from contracted baby feelings, jolting jealousies. Learn German, Italian. Joy. How much and how many in this life want merely “a good deal.” A self-interested shuffling of the cards in the right, plush-enough combination. I am worried about being lazy if happy, worried about being self-deluding if working on anything. So little myself all other identities threaten me. Dreamer forever. Robert Lowell and his wife and the Fassetts are coming to dinner this week. I am wondering what to serve them all in one dish. Lemon meringue pie. Will read Hardwick’s stories at the library. I want their success without their spirit or work.…
Wednesday, January 28. A clear blue day, a close-clipped furze of white snow crisping all the cockeyed angles of roof and chimney below, and the river white. Sun behind the building to the left, striking a gold-dollar glow from a domed tower I don’t know the name of. If I can only write a page, half a page, here every day and keep myself counting blessings and working slowly to come into a better life.
Oddly happy yesterday, in spite of a bad morning, when I think I did nothing but work on a silly poem about a bull-ocean which evades all direct statement of anything under the pretense of symbolic allegory. Read A. C. Rich today, finished her book of poems in half an hour: they stimulate me: they are easy, yet professional, full of infelicities and numb gesturings at something, but instinct with “philosophy,” what I need. Sudden desire to do a series of Cambridge and Benidorm poems. Am I crude to say “The New Yorker sort”? That means something.
Amazingly happy afternoon with Shirley yesterday. Took subway out. Smoky day, smoke white against snow-filled sky, smoke gray-black against pale twilight sky coming back. Brought my bundle of woolens and began to make the braided rug: immense pleasure cutting the good thick stuggs, wrestling with the material and getting a braid begun. Talked easily about babies, fertility, amazingly frank and pleasant. Have always wanted to “make something” by hand, where other women sew and knit and embroider, and this I feel is my thing. John sat in high chair, Shirley fed and bathed and bedded him, very easily. He was loving to me, hugging me and rubbing his forehead against mine. Felt part of young womanhood. How odd, men don’t interest me at all now, only women and women-talk. It is as if Ted were my representative in the world of men. Must read some sociology, Spock on babies. All questions answered.
Can I do the poems? By a kind of contagion?
Came home & happily made a quick hamburg supper. Lowells coming tomorrow and all the cleaning and planning for that I put off till tonight. Must get my hair cut next week. Symbolic: get over instinct to be dowdy lip-biting little girl. Get bathrobe and slippers and nightgown & work on femininity.…
The cat is biting more now, but after mackerel this morning most endearingly climbed up my shoulder and nuzzled. Must try poems. DO NOT SHOW ANY TO TED. I sometimes feel a paralysis come over me: his opinion is so important to me. Didn’t show him the bull one: a small victory. Also, be growing into a habit of happiness. That will work also. A check, $10 from The Nation for “Frog Autumn.” Welcome. Am happy about living in England: to go to Europe at the drop of a channel-crossing ticket: I really want that. How odd: I would have been amazed five, ten years ago at the thought of this. And delighted. Must use R.B. to the hilt.
Friday, February 13, 1959. First time I’ve had the heart to write in here for weeks. A lousy green depressing cold. Cried with the old stone-deep gloom with R.B. yesterday. She said I don’t work as well [when I feel] so bad: I think I’m going to get well and then I feel I can’t; need to be punished. Get a job, in Cambridge, somewhere in a 10 day limit. I dream of bookstores, Design Research. That would be something.…
We are fools. The alarm on, we shower and rise. Five hours from seven to twelve is all we need for writing. She says: you won’t write. This is so, not that I can’t, although I say I can’t.
Have been reading Faulkner. At last. Sanctuary and beginning the collected stories and excerpts. Will go on a jag. Absolutely flawless descriptive style: and much description: dogs, their smells, fuckings and terrors. Scenes. Whorehouse interiors. Colors, humor and above all a fast plot: rape with corn cobs, sexual deviation, humans shot and burned alive, he gets it in. And where are my small incidents, the blood poured from the shoes?
Thursday, February 19. The North Wind doth blow. Gray and snowflakes blowing suddenly like bits of white paper. Ann Hopkins white-and-black spotted fixed female cat trying to get settled in smaller and smaller boxes, finally managing, and hiding its head in foetal position for a cat, I imagine. Then crawling up under her red bedspread and lying under it in the middle of the bed, an inert red lump. Queer: born with flying-squirrel flaps and too many thumbs which bunch out from its feet.
A misery. Wrote a Granchester poem of pure description. I must get philosophy in. Until I do I shall lag behind A.C.R. A fury of frustration, some inhibition keeping me from writing what I really feel. I began a poem, “Suicide Off Egg Rock,” but set up such a strict verse form that all power was lost: my nose so close I couldn’t see what I was doing. An anesthetizing of feeling. Keeping me from work on a novel. To forget myself for the work, instead of nudging the work to be my reason for being and my self.
Dinners and parties all this week, which I am glad to forgo from now on. Heard Wilbur read: oddly, I was bored to death. I enjoy his poems more when I read them myself: his voice is dull, playing a joke on the poem with the audience, his clever poems on the Mind Cave-Bat and Lamarck merely ingenious. Eighteenth-century manners. Stanley Kunitz, in his best three or four poems much much finer. Stanley getting $15,000 from the Ford Foundation for two years of writing what he wants where he wants. We hearing nothing from the Guggenheim. I, sitting here as if brainless wanting both a baby and a career but god knows what if it isn’t writing. What inner decision, what inner murder or prison break must I commit if I want to speak from my true deep voice in writing (which I somehow boggle at spelling) and not feel this jam-up of feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-facade of numb dumb wordage. Somewhat cheered by The Spectator printing my two small poems. I think success would be heartening now. But, most heartening, the feeling [as if] I were breaking out of my glass caul. What am I afraid of? Growing old and dying without being Somebody? It is good for me to be away from the natural stellar position at Smith. I look queerly forward to living in England: hope I can work for some weekly in London, publish in the women’s magazines, maybe. England seems so small and digestible from here.…
Wednesday, February 25. The anniversary of our meeting, third. Last night a miserable dowie dowie fight over nothing, our usual gloom. I am ready to blame it all on myself. The day is an accusation. Pure and clear and ready to be the day of creation, snow white on all the rooftops and the sun on it and the sky a high clear blue bell jar.
Lousy dreams. Forget last night’s. Gary Haupt was in it, refusing to speak and passing by with a stiff accusing and sallow face as if he smelt something bad. The other night it was men in costume, bright cummerbunds, knickers and white blouses, having a penalty given them, and not carried out, and suddenly forty years later they were lined up, I saw them small in the distance, and a man with his back to me and a great sword in his hand went down the line hacking off their legs at the knees, whereupon the men fell down like ninepins with their leg stumps and lower legs scattered. I believe they were supposed to dig their own graves on their leg stumps. This is too much. The world is so big so big so big. I need to feel a meaning and productiveness in my life.
Got somewhere last week with Dr. B., I think. The resurrection of the awful Woodrow Wilson interview at Harvard. What I fear worst is failure, and this is stopping me from trying to write because then I don’t have to blame failure on my writing: it is a last ditch defense, not quite the last—the last is when the words dissolve and the letters crawl away. Knowing this, how can I go to work? Transfer this knowledge to my inmost demons?
Ted’s thinking idea good. I listed five subjects and got no farther than Egg Rock. Wrote a ghastly poem in strictly varying line lengths with no feeling in it although the scene was fraught with emotion. Then did it over, much better: got something of what I wanted. Pulled. To the neat easy A.C.R.-ishi lyricism, to the graphic description of the world. My main thing now is to start with real things: real emotions, and leave out the baby gods, the old men of the sea, the thin people, the knights, the moon-mothers, the mad maudlins, the Lorelei, the hermits, and get into me, Ted, friends, mother and brother and father and family. The real world. Real situations, behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and death.
Lowell’s class yesterday a great disappointment: I said a few mealymouthed things, a few B.U. students yattered nothings I wouldn’t let my Smith freshmen say without challenge. Lowell good in his mildly feminine ineffectual fashion. Felt a regression. The main thing is hearing the other students’ poems & his reaction to mine. I need an outsider: feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can’t understand a word he’s saying.
When I write my first Ladies’ Home Journal story I will have made a step forward. I don’t have to be a bourgeois mother to do it either. The reason I don’t write them is that it is safer from rejection not to—then I haven’t the opportunity to be in jeopardy.…
Oh, to break out into prose.
Saturday, February 28.… Nightmare before going to R.B. this week: train broke down in subway in a fire of blue sparks, got on wrong track, driving in old car with Ted, drove into deep snowdrift and the car fell apart, struggled to a telephone after 11, her maid answered, and I felt she was home, either knowing this would happen and thus not coming out, or pretending she wasn’t home. Bought blue shoes on the way back from seeing her. Relived with all the emotion the episode at the hospital in Carlisle.j Murderous emotions in a child can’t be dealt with through reason, in an adult they can.
Read Faulkner yesterday, after Tolstoi’s superb Death of Ivan Ilyitch, a sustained full-pitch rendering of the beast-man’s fear and horror of dying. Is Ivan’s knowledge, in a flash, at the last, that his life has been all wrong, a steady downgrade in just those points he thought it most a success, redemptive in any sense? He dies in peace, or at least, in a sudden recession of fear, in an access of light. But was the pain intended to bring this about? I think not. Suffering is because it is, the voice answers.…
Monday, March 9. After a lugubrious session with R.B., much freed. Good weather, good bits of news. If I don’t stop crying she’ll have me tied up. Got idea on the trolley for a poem because of my ravaged face: called “The Ravaged Face.” A line came, too. Wrote it down and then the five lines of a sestet. Wrote the first eight lines after coming back from a fine afternoon in Winthrop yesterday. I rather like it—it has the forthrightness of “Suicide Off Egg Rock.” Also finished a New Yorkerish but romantic iambic pentameter imitation of Roethke’s Yeats poems. Rather weak, not, I think, book material, but I’ll send it to The New Yorker and see what they think.
A clear blue day in Winthrop. Went to my father’s grave, a very depressing sight. Three graveyards separated by streets, all made within the last fifty years or so, ugly crude block stones, headstones together, as if the dead were sleeping head to head in a poorhouse. In the third yard, on a flat grassy area looking across a sallow barren stretch to rows of wooden tenements, I found the flat stone, “Otto E. Plath: 1885–1940,” right beside the path, where it would be walked over. Felt cheated. My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead. How far gone would he be? No trees, no peace, his headstone jammed up against the body on the other side. Left shortly. It is good to have the place in mind.…
My desire for a career apart from writing. Writing impossible as my one thing, it is so dried up, so often. I would like to study comparative literature. The discipline of a Ph.D. attracts me in my foolhardiness, or of reporting for weeklies, or of reviewing. I must use my brain in the world, not just at home on private things.
Great cramps, stirrings. It is still just period time, but I have even waves of nausea. Am I pregnant? That would queer my jobs for a while, I guess. If only I could come to the novel, or at least the Ladies’ Home Journal stories. Maybe some good pregnant poems, if I know I really am.
Friday, March 20. Yesterday a nadir of sorts. Woke up to cat’s early mewling around six. Cramps. Pregnant I thought. Not, such luck. After a long 40 day period of hope, the old blood cramps and spilt fertility. I had lulled myself into a fattening calm and this was a blow.… I’d like four in a row. Then dopey, and the cramps all day. I am getting nowhere with Dr. B. I feel I deliberately put myself into a self-pitying helpless state. Next week. What good does talking about my father do? It may be a minor catharsis that lasts a day or two, but I don’t get insight talking to myself. What insight am I trying to get to free what? If my emotional twists are at the bottom of misery, how can I get to know what they are and what to do with them? She can’t make me write, or if I do write, write well. She can give me more directives or insight in what I am doing and for what general ends I am doing it. I regress terribly there. I may have all the answers to my questions in myself, but I need some catalyst to get them into my consciousness.…
I cry at everything. Simply to spite myself and embarrass myself. Finished two poems, a long one, “Electra on Azalea Path,” and “Metaphors for a Pregnant Woman,” ironic, nine lines, nine syllables in each. They are never perfect, but I think have goodnesses. Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell’s class: criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Anne Sexton,k an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.
A desire to get my hair cut attractively instead of this mousy ponytail. Will no doubt go out and get a pageboy cut as of old. Is it money keeps me back? Must get fixed up.…
Refusal to write. I just don’t. Except for these few poems, which have been coming thicker and better. I see the right state of mind like a never never land ahead of me. That casual, gay verve. Alas alas. I maunch on chagrins.…
Got at some deep things with R.B.: facing dark and terrible things: those dreams of deformity and death. If I really think I killed and castrated my father may all my dreams of deformed and tortured people be my guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me? And how to lay them? To stop them operating through the rest of my life?
I have a vision of the poems I would write, but do not. When will they come?…
Thursday, April 23. As with April, spring manifests itself in joyous news. I am tired, having got up and out of Ted’s workroom by 7, after two weeks of pre- and post-Guggenheim lethargy. We are transfigured. After a near-miss, a query and paltering over the budget and the place of travel, we got it, and rounded off to the furthest thousand, $5,000, which seems incredibly princely to us. After an invitation to Yaddol for two months in September and October, which we at first interpreted as a consolation prize. Guggenheim day: Friday, April 10.
Also, yesterday, my second acceptance from The New Yorker: a pleasant two: the “Water Color of Grantchester Meadows,” which I wrote bucolically “for” them, and “Man in Black,” the only “love” poem in my book, and the “book poem” which I wrote only a little over a month ago on one of my fruitful visits to Winthrop. Must do justice to my father’s grave. Have rejected the Electra poem from my book. Too forced and rhetorical. A leaf from Anne Sexton’s book would do here. She has none of my clenches, and an ease of phrase, and an honesty. I have my 40 unattackable poems. I think. And a joy about them of sorts. Although I would love more potent ones. All the Smith ones are miserable death wishes. The ones here, however gray (“Companionable Ills,” “Owl”), have a verve and life-joy.…
The “dead black” in my poem [“Man in Black”] may be a transference from the visit to my father’s grave.
Worked and worked with R.B.: the skip of a week gave me courage and momentum: stayed awake the whole night before thinking over what I have come through and to. Concentrated on my suicide: a knot in which much is caught.… How to overcome my naïveté in writing? Read others and think hard. Never step outside my own voice, such as I know it.
I think: a Wuthering Heights article for red-shoe money. Correct the word in my Monitor poem. Start a poem for The Bed Book.m A story on the hospital. About the affair of Starbuck & Sexton.n A double story, “August Lighthill and the Other Woman.” … Here is horror. And all the details. Get life in spurts in stories, then the novel will come. A way. By the time I get to Yaddo, three good publishable stories and The Bed Book done!
Saturday, April 25. Clear day, dragged up as usual early, but exhausted, too much so to write, so worked on polishing up essay on Withens [Yorkshire] only to be stopped in title from final typing by not knowing spelling Withens or Withins.…
Sunday, May 3, 1959.… Retyped pages, a messy job, on the volume of poems I should be turning in to Houghton Mifflin this week. But A.S.o is there ahead of me, with her lover G.S.p writing New Yorker odes to her and both of them together: felt our triple-martini afternoons at the Ritz breaking up. That memorable afternoon at G.’s monastic and miserly room on Pinckney: “You shouldn’t have left us”: where is responsibility to lie? I left, yet felt like a brown-winged moth around a rather meager candle flame, drawn. That is over. As [W. D.] Snodgrass would say.
I wrote a book yesterday. Maybe I’ll write a postscript on top of this in the next month and say I’ve sold it. Yes, after half a year of procrastinating, bad feeling and paralysis, I got to it yesterday morning, having lines in my head here and there, and Wide-Awake Will and Stay-Uppity Sue very real, and bang. I chose ten beds out of the long list of too fancy and ingenious and abstract a list of beds, and once I’d begun I was away and didn’t stop till I typed out and mailed it (8 double-spaced pages only!) to the Atlantic Press. The Bed Book, by Sylvia Plath. Funny how doing it freed me. It was a bat, a bad-conscience bat brooding in my head. If I didn’t do it I would do nothing. A ready-made good idea and an editor writing to say she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. So I did it. I feel if The Atlantic is stupid enough to reject it someone else will snap it up, and better so, if they will also take my poems.… Suddenly it frees me—and Ted, too. I can go to the magazine rack this morning and get a NY Times, a New Yorker, a Writer’s Mag and not feel drowned or sick. Me, I will make my place, a queer, rather smallish place, but room and view enough to be happy in.…
Wednesday, May 13, 1959.… Bothered about R.B.: I seem to want to cover everything up, like a cat its little crappings with sand, perhaps before leaving for California?
Well, I must bring up those pressure points: suicide, deflowering, T.’s sister, and present writing; lack of rooted social life, yet not minding it; lack of children. Today. Also concern about mind getting lazy. Learning languages.
My Bull of Bendylaw book of poems is much better arranged. Also, at this rate, with “Arts in Society” accepting “Sculptor,” “The Goring” (which I was beginning to think unsalable) and “Aftermath,” I have only 13 poems to publish before all 45 are in print, and these poems should not be too hard to sell.…
Monday, May 18.… Changed title of poetry book in an inspiration to The Devil of the Stairs, which I hope has never been used before. The Bull of Bendylaw, which was catching, had an obscure point, the idea of energy breaking through ceremonional forms, but this title encompasses my book & “Explains” the poems of despair, which is as deceitful as hope is. Hope this goes through.
Dreamed last night of being a matron with seven daughters, like dolls, whom I was to dress in party dresses, all graded rose-colors, yet I found blue and purple dresses among the yellow and pink. Great confusion. Have they their gloves, their pocket money in their pocketbooks?…
Wednesday, May 20. All I need now is to hear that G.S. or M. K.q has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children’s book. A.S. has her book accepted at Houghton Mifflin and this afternoon will be drinking champagne. Also an essay accepted by PJHH, the copycat. But who’s to criticize a more successful copycat. Not to mention a poetry reading at McLean. And G.S. at supper last night smug as a cream-fed cat, very pleased indeed, for A.S. is in a sense his answer to me. And now my essay, on Withens, will come back from PJHH, and my green-eyed fury prevents me from working. Or will drive me into hibernation & more work. Tell T. nothing. He generalized about the article on water voles he hadn’t read, expatiating from PJHH’s note: Oh, all your stuff, the trouble with it is it’s too general. So I won’t bother showing him the story on Sweetie Pie I’ve done, keep the viper out of the household & send it out on my own. My first accepted story would give me intense joy: but even without it, I shall plod on and on, free as I am at present and for a year of the need to work, free as yet of children. Fight last night, he not bothering to perceive how intolerable it is to me to work (ho, have I worked? very little) and feel everything stagnating on my desk, and I lying awake and tense, the air fearfully wet and hot, the sheets damp and heavy. Got up finally and read all of Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, which except for the first novella I found excellent, rich, and always fascinating, entertaining. Even laughed. Got to bed at 3. Bad sleep. Woke to the same hostile silences. He did make coffee. Banged about. I showered and felt better and in this sweet nauseous thick air am waiting to get mail, rejections, to go to Dr. B. (am very ashamed to tell her of immediate jealousies—the result of my extraprofessional fondness for her, which has inhibited me) and then the Sultans will disarrange the day, and the Booths for dinner. He should be some comfort, he is nice, if almost pathetically serious and earnest.
What to do with anger, ask her. One thing to say: Yes, I want the world’s praise, money & love, and am furious with anyone, especially with anyone I know or who has had a similar experience, getting ahead of me. Well, what to do when this surges up and over & over? Last night I knew that Mother didn’t matter—she is all for me, but I have dissipated her image and she becomes all editors and publishers and critics and the World, and I want acceptance there, and to feel my work good and well-taken. Which ironically freezes me at my work, corrupts my nunnish labor of work-for-itself-as-its-own-reward. Hit this today.
Learn from Roth. Study, study. Go inward. There it is pure. Or may be, one day.
Shower, keep clean, enjoy colors and animals. People, if possible. How I love the Baskins. The only people I feel are a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no smarm. I MUST WRITE ABOUT THE THINGS OF THE WORLD WITH NO GLAZING. I know enough about love, hate, catastrophe to do so.
Reading V. Woolf’s The Years. With rain, she can unite a family, here in London, there in the country, in Oxford. But too disparate. By skipping five, eleven years, and from person to person, suddenly a little girl is in her fifties with gray hair, and so we learn time passes, all moves. But the descriptions, the observations, the feelings caught and let slip.
Dreamt one dream I remember, as apposite and ironical to this morning’s mail. Read J. D. Salinger’s long Seymour: An Introduction last night and today, put off at first by the rant at the beginning about Kafka, Kierkegaard, etc., but increasingly enchanted. Dreamed, oh, how amusedly, that I picked up a New Yorker, opened to about the third story (not in the back, this was important, but with a whole front page, on the right, to itself) and read “This Earth—That House, That Hospital” in the deeply endearing New Yorker-heading type, rather like painstakingly inked hand-lettering. Felt a heart palpitation (my sleep becomes such a reasonable facsimile of my waking life) and thought “That’s my title, or a corruption of it.” And of course, it is: an alteration of “This Earth Our Hospital” and either a very good or an abominable variation of it. Read on: my own prose: only it was the Sweetie Pie story, the backyard tale, with the would-be Salinger child in it. Dr. B. congratulating me. Mother turning away, saying: “I don’t know, I just can’t seem to feel anything about it at all.” Which shows, I think, that Dr. B. has become my mother. Felt radiant, a New Yorker glow lighting my face. Precisely analagous to that young British society girl Susan who, after being deflowered in a canoe house, asks her handsome young deflowerer: Don’t I look Different? Oh, I looked different. A pale, affluent nimbus emanating from my generally podgy and dough-colored face.
This morning woke to get a letter in the mail from the estimable Dudley Fitts,r which I numbly translated to be a kind refusal of The Bull of Bendylaw, saying I missed “by a whisper,” was the alternate, but my lack of technical finish (!) was what deterred him, my roughness, indecision, my drift in all but four or five poems. When my main flaw is a machinelike syllabic death-blow. A real sense of Bad Luck. Will I ever be liked for anything other than the wrong reasons? My book is as finished as it will ever be. And after the Hudson acceptance, I have great hopes that all 46 poems will be accepted within a few months. So what. I have no champions. They will find a lack of this, or that, or something or other. How few of my superiors do I respect the opinions of anyhow? Lowell a case in point. How few, if any, will see what I am working at, overcoming? How ironic, that all my work to overcome my easy poeticisms merely convinces them that I am rough, antipoetic, unpoetic. My God.…
… Reading in bed. Warm comforts. Began The Lonely Crowd this morning, an antidote to V. Woolf’s tiresome The Years, finished last night. She flits, she throws out her gossamer net. Rose, at age 9, sneaks to the store in the evening alone. Then she is fat, gray-haired, 59, snatching at remarks, lights, colors. Surely this is not Life, not even real life: there is not even the ladies magazine entrance into sustained loves, jealousies, boredoms. The recreation is that of the most superficial observer at a party of dull old women who have never spilt blood. That is what one misses in Woolf. Her potatoes and sausage. What is her love, her childless life, like, that she misses it, except in Mrs. Ramsey, Clarissa Dalloway? Surely if it is valid there, she should not keep losing it to lighting effects followed over the general geographic area of England, which are fine, painstaking, but in the last ditch, school-essay things. Out of this fragmentary welter the best works rise. Of course life is fragmentary, deaf people not hearing the point, lovers laughing at each other over nonsense, but she shows no deeper currents under the badinage.
What to discuss with Dr. B.? Work, desire for work of meaning. To learn German. To write, be a Renaissance woman.
Sunday, May 31. A heavenly, clear, cool Sunday, a clean calendar for the week ahead, and a magnificent sense of space, creative power and virtue. Virtue. I wonder if it will be rewarded. I have written six stories this year, and the three best of them in the last two weeks! (Order: “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” “The Fifteen Dollar Eagle,” “The Shadow,” “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” “Above the Oxbow,” and “This Earth Our Hospital”). Very good titles. I have a list of even better. Ideas flock where one plants a single seed.
I feel that this month I have conquered my Panic Bird. I am a calm, happy and serene writer. With a pleasant sense of learning and being better with every story, and at the same time the spurred tension that comes from knowing they fall short, in this way or that, from what I see ahead, ten stories, twenty stories from now.
I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may: rejections or curtailed budgets. My best story is “This Earth Our Hospital.” … Full of humor, highly colored characters, good, rhythmic conversation. An amazing advance from “Johnny Panic,” set in the same place, but told all as an essay, with only one or two other characters.
I think of a book, or a book of stories: This Earth Our Hospital. That is what I would call it, pray nobody beats me to it. I weep with joy.
Last night I sent off my application from here for a TV writing grant. Oddly enough, it would cause such complications in our plans that I half don’t want it, yet it would mean an income, combined, of $10,000 the year. I have an amazingly interesting biography, am young, promising. Why won’t they give me one of the five? Money, money. I like CBS, too. They are more inventive than most stations. Another test, like Mile’s June month—only more dangerous: would I pass, keep myself intact? Interesting.
Sent off “Above the Oxbow,” which I wrote up from an “exercise” I did last July and which moved me very much, and “This Earth Our Hospital” to The Atlantic, a very good contrast. If they don’t take the latter story they’re crazy. It would be a Best American Short Story.
Amusingly, and significantly, these two stories at The Atlantic free me from an overemphasis on the two at The New Yorker, which I feel now will probably be rejected. I will have two more and better stories out by the time I hear from The Atlantic, and slowly pile them up. I feel to have come, for the first time in my life, to a breakthrough into that placid, creative Wife of Bath humored Sea I only saw in glimpses from a very narrow, reef-crammed strait. The house is clean, polished. My assignments are off, and I have a list of others to begin:
The System & I: a humorous essay about 3 or 4 run-ins with socialized medicine.
The Little Mining Town in Colorado: about a young girl’s plunge into the hothouse world of soap opera while she is bedded with rheumatic fever: relation with her parents and her very strong nurse figure (this suggested by Steve Fassett’s account of his nurse, who really didn’t want him to get well; he was her life for 15 years and in such a sybaritic, no, no, such a symbiotic relationship pattern found it intolerable when he opposed his will to hers). Point at which soap opera and real worlds fuse, and then separate.…
Supper at Frances Minturn Howard’s on Mount Vernon Street. The sense of old, subtle elegance. Red plush sofas, tarnished, yet glinting silver tea paper on the walls. Oil miniatures of cousins, Julia Ward Howe background. A supper, light and delectable, of ham, succulent with fat and cloves and crust, asparagus, and a thread-thin noodle cooked in chicken broth and browned with cheese and bread crumbs. Vanilla ice cream, fresh strawberries and finger-size jelly rolls for dessert.
Her garden: a cool white-painted well. Spanish wrought-iron flowerpot holders. A brick flower bed built up all around. Tall, Dutch tulips, just past their prime. Ivy, a fountain with a dolphin. A frog in the shrubbery. Solomon’s seal. Bleeding hearts. And the brick walls whitewashed to the height of a room, giving a light, Spanish patio effect. Dutchman’s-pipe, or some such vine, forming a lattice of green leaves over the brick wall at the back. A great tree, what is it, those mosquito trees, tree of heaven, plunging up to the light between the buildings. Rum and lemon juice, and the cool elegant plopping of the water.…
Jain monks in India; seeable only in 3-month rainy season as they have a vow to move on every night otherwise. Elaborate metaphorical pleas for money and scholarships at Harvard from Poona, Agra, etc. Indian fairy tales, bad translations of the great poets.…
I feel in a rug-braiding mood today. Very sleepy, as after a good lovemaking, after all that writing this week. My poems are so far in the background now. It is a very healthy antidote, this prose, to the poems’ intense limitations.…
A happier sense of life, not hectic, but very slow and sure, than I have ever had. That sea, calm, with sun bland on it. Containing and receiving all the reefy, narrow straits in its great reservoir of peace.
Saturday, June 13.… Stayed up till about 3 this morning, feeling again the top of my head would come off, it was so full, so full of knowledge. Found out yesterday, George Starbuck won the Yale. He is sure this proves him the Best. Calling up, “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” I had inured myself to a better book than mine, but this seemed a rank travesty.…
For Dr. B.: It is not when I have a baby, but that I have one, and more, which is of supreme importance to me. I have always been extremely fond of the definition of Death which says it is: Inaccessability to Experience, a Jamesian view, but so good. And for a woman to be deprived of the Great Experience her body is formed to partake of, to nourish, is a great and wasting Death. After all, a man need physically do no more than have the usual intercourse to become a father. A woman has 9 months of becoming something other than herself, of separating from this otherness, of feeding it and being a source of milk and honey to it. To be deprived of this is a death indeed. And to consummate love by bearing the child of the loved one is far profounder than any orgasm or intellectual rapport.…
… Read Jean Stafford, so much more human than Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick’s characters utterly unlikable in any way. A sense of the superior position of writer and reader—even the baby, as Agathas shrewdly observed, although it only appears for a paragraph, is a nasty louse, unredeemed. Stafford full of color, warmth, humor, even her witches and child-thiefs are human, humorous, part of the world, not small flat cutouts with sticky eyelashes.…
MENTAL HOSPITAL STORIES: Lazarus theme. Come back from the dead. Kicking off thermometers. Violent ward. LAZARUS MY LOVE.
I feel insufferable impatience. This week my Bed Book should be either accepted or rejected by the Atlantic Press. I have sent my revision to Emilie McLeod. After the grim news Starbuck got the Yale, to which I am now resigned, if disappointed in Fitts’s judgment, and that Maxine [Kumin] also got a letter from Henry Holt (and how many other women also?) I feel very dubious about wanting to be published by Holt: a pride, a sense that I wouldn’t want it unless they put me up for the Lamont. If only Knopf accepted my book I’d say hell to the Lamont. Knopf, or Harcourt, Brace or Macmillan (maybe) or Viking. If only [M. L.] Rosenthal would write me about Macmillan. But my book, grim as it is, needs a prize to sell it.
NOW: the story about George, Anne and the children. An insufferable woman (myself of course) gets involved in the separated family. She thinks G. will be fondest of her, tells mad wife (she’s sick, I mean, really sick) it is of course Anne, feels very clever. Then finds out, when A.’s book is accepted, it is really A., gets furious. Calls up … or gets sociologist friend to call up Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, never really finds out if they get through. Day in park. Children can’t speak, finds herself throwing peanuts to pigeons, etc. Ducks, squirrels, children blank-staring and oblivious. Smell bad, girl urinates on bench. I wouldn’t be surprised to read tomorrow in the paper how that little girl was killed falling from that roof. Of course she never does read any such thing. Her good will perverted, conditional on pity that would generate from self if G. was her lover, when cheated of that, it becomes nasty busybodiness. THE OLYMPIANS. Poor, married poets in Ritz bar.…
Ann Peregrine was as methodical about committing suicide as she was about cleaning house.
Tuesday, June 16. A discovery. I’d already discovered it, but didn’t know what it meant. A discovery, a name: SADIE PEREGRINE. I had her being Mrs. Whatsis in the beginnings of my Silver Pie-server story. Suddenly she became the heroine of my novel Falcon Yard. Oh, the irony. Oh, the character. In the first place: S. P., my initials. Just thought of this. Then, peregrine falcon. Oh, Oh. Let nobody have thought of this. And Sadie: sadistic. La. Wanderer. She is enough, this Sadie Peregrine, to write the novel at Yaddo while I fish for bass.…
OUR THIRD WEDDING ANNIVERSARY TODAY. Ted lost our good umbrella (his first wedding present to me was an umbrella, this lost one a different one, about the third, as we have lost several) yesterday in the Book Store while buying our anniversary present to each other: Will Grohmann’s Paul Klee book. Superb. The Seafarer in full color.…
Saturday, June 20. Everything has gone barren. I am part of the world’s ash, something from which nothing can grow, nothing can flower or come to fruit. In the lovely words of 20th century medicine, I can’t ovulate. Or don’t. Didn’t this month, didn’t last month. For ten years I may have been having cramps and for nothing. I have worked, bled, knocked my head on walls to break through to where I am now. With the one man in the world right for me, the one man I could love. I would bear children until my change of life if that were possible. I want a house of our children, little animals, flowers, vegetables, fruits. I want to be an Earth Mother in the deepest richest sense. I have turned from being an intellectual, a career woman: all that is ash to me. And what do I meet in myself? Ash. Ash and more ash.
I will enter in to the horrible clinical cycle of diagramming intercourse, rushing to be analyzed when I’ve had a period, when I’ve had intercourse. Getting injections of this and that, hormones, thyroid, becoming something other than myself, becoming synthetic. My body a test tube. “People who haven’t conceived in six months have a problem, dearie,” the doctor said. And, taking out the little stick with cotton on the end from my cervix, held it up to his assistant nurse: “Black as black.” If I had ovulated it would be green. Same test, ironically, used to diagnose diabetes. Green, the color of life and eggs and sugar fluid. “He found the exact day I ovulated,” the nurse told me. “It’s a wonderful test, less expensive, easier.” Ha. Suddenly the deep foundations of my being are gnawn. I have come, with great pain and effort, to the point where my desires and emotions and thoughts center around what the normal woman’s center around, and what do I find? Barrenness.
Suddenly everything is ominous, ironic, deadly. If I could not have children—and if I do not ovulate how can I?—how can they make me?—I would be dead. Dead to my woman’s body. Intercourse would be dead, a dead end. My pleasure no pleasure, a mockery. My writing a hollow and failing substitute for real life, real feeling, instead of a pleasant extra, a bonus flowering and fruiting. Ted should be a patriarch. I a mother. My love for him, to express our love, us, through my body, the doors of my body, utterly thwarted. To say I am abnormally pessimistic about this is to say that any woman should face not ovulating with a cavalier grin. Or “a sense of humor.” Ha again.
I see no mailman. A lovely clear morning. I cried and cried. Last night, today. How can I keep Ted wedded to a barren woman? Barren barren. His last poem, the title poem of his book, being a ceremony to make a barren woman fertile: “Flung from the chain of the living, the Past killed in her, the Future plucked out.” “Touch this frozen one.” My god. And his children’s book, on the same day as I went to the doctor, yesterday, getting the long, praising letter from T. S. Eliot. Meet My Folks! And no child, not even the beginnings or the hopes of one, to dedicate it to. And my Bed Book: not accepted yet, but it will be, whether the cloudy McLeod rejects it or not, and I dedicating it to Marty’s adopted twins. My god. This is the one thing in the world I can’t face. It is worse than a horrible disease. Esther has multiple sclerosis, but she has children.…
During the summer, the Hugheses took a trip across America, Sylvia pregnant. On their return they went to the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Sylvia wrote nearly a third of her first book of poems, The Colossus. They had earlier made the decision to return to England to live and await the birth of their first child.
Wednesday, September 16.… Woke out of a warm dream to hear Ted rustling and moving, getting his fishing things together. Dark, more sleep, then the red sun in my eyes, horizontal beams through the dark pines. The faint, brimming nausea gone, which has troubled me the past days. Air clear enough for angels. The wet dews gleaming on the rusty pine needles underfoot, standing on the looped plant stems in pale drops. The great dining room handsome: the dark-beamed ceiling, the high carved chairs and mammoth tables; the terra-cotta plaster in a frieze about the polished woods. Honey oozing out of the comb, steaming coffee on the hot plate. Boiled eggs and butter. Through the leaded windows the green hills melting into blue, and the frost-white marble statues at the garden fountain. I shall miss this grandeur when we move above the garage—the gilded old velvets of pillows, and the glow of worn rich carpets, the indoor fountain, the stained glass, the oil paintings of the Trask children, the moony sea, George Washington.
A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use. Disgust with the 17-page story I just finished: a stiff artificial piece about a man killed by a bear, ostensibly because his wife willed it to happen, but none of the deep emotional undercurrents gone into or developed. As if little hygienic transparent lids shut out the seethe and deep-grounded swell of my experience. Putting up pretty artificial statues. I can’t get outside myself. Even in the tattoo story I did better: got an outside world. Poems are nowhere:
Outside the window the wet fern
I said to myself yesterday, reading Arthur Miller in Ted’s studio, my foot-soles scorching on the stove. I feel a helplessness when I think of my writing being nothing, coming to nothing: for I have no other job—not teaching, not publishing. And a guilt grows in me to have all my time my own. I want to store money like a squirrel stores nuts. Yet what would money do? We have elegant dinners here: sweetbreads, sausages, bacon and mushrooms; ham and mealy orange sweet potatoes; chicken and garden beans. I walked in the vegetable garden, beans hanging on the bushes, squash, yellow and orange, fattening in the dapple of leaves, corn, grapes purpling on the vine, parsley, rhubarb. And wondered where the solid, confident purposeful days of my youth vanished. How shall I come into the right, rich full-fruited world of middle-age? Unless I work. And get rid of the accusing, never-satisfied gods who surround me like a crown of thorns. Forget myself, myself. Become a vehicle of the world, a tongue, a voice. Abandon my ego.…
In the morning light, all is possible; even becoming a god.
Friday, September 25. Again woke to hear Ted readying for fishing. Foolishly griped at being woken: that’s enough to make a man kill his wife. Why should he stay in bed soundless till I choose to stir? Absurd. Yet I woke from a bad dream. Oh, I’m full of them. Keep them to myself or I’ll drive the world morbid. I gave birth, with one large cramp, to a normal-sized baby, only it was not quite a five-months baby. I asked at the counter if it was all right, if anything was wrong, and the nurse said: “Oh, it has nest of uterus in its nose, but nothing is wrong with the heart.” How is that? Symbolic of smother in the womb? Image of mother dead with the Eye Bank having cut her eyes out. Not a dream, but a vision. I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. I haven’t done German since I came. Haven’t studied art books. As if I needed a teacher’s sanction for it.
Spent an hour or so yesterday writing down notes about Yaddo library, for they will close the magnificent mansion this weekend after all the guests come. The famous Board. John Cheever, Robert Penn Warren. I have nothing to say to them. It would not matter if I had a sort of rich inner life, but that is a blank. Would getting a degree help me? I’d have to know a lot more, study, keep juggling my understandings, but why can’t I do this on my own? Where is my willpower? The Idea of a life gets in the way of my life. As if my interest in English had crippled me: yet it supports myriads of professors, and they make a life. Always this desperate need to have a job, a work to steady my sense of purpose.
Yesterday, the great thick tiger cat that always waylays us by the garage and bit at Ted the last time we patted it, bit Mrs. Mansion so badly on the hand that she had to go to the hospital. They are going to kill the cat, I think. It is nowhere in sight. Mrs. A. going to kill hers, too, she announced suddenly at supper: “It’s cramped my style. She’s lived nine years, that’s long enough.” A queer cold thing for her to come out with suddenly.…
Wrote one good poem so far: an imagist piece on the dead snake. Am working on a rambling memoir or Cornucopia. Will try farm story in character of simple girl next: read Eudora Welty aloud. Much more color and world to her than to Jean Stafford, somehow.
Wasps gather and swarm in skylight, then disappear. My flesh crawls. Sun pure through spaces of pines, bright on needles. Crows caw. Birds warble. List incidents for possible stories. Read for poem subjects. Next to snake poem, my book poems are all about ghosts and otherworldly miasmas—R. Frost would not take it, I am sure, but I wish they’d hurry and let me know.
Saturday, September 26.… Listened to Schwarzkopf singing Schubert lieder last night in the music room. Immensely moved, “Who is Sylvia?” and “Mein ruh ist hin” recognizable, words here and there: a strong sense of my own past, from which I am alienated by ignorance of language which I find difficult to break through.
Reading much Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, must go through Katharine Anne Porter. Read “A Worn Path,” “Livvie,” “The Whistle” aloud. That is a way to feel on my tongue what I admire. “The Interior Castle” a lurid, terrifying recreation of intolerable pain.…
Must get into deep stories where all experience becomes usable to me. Tell from one person’s point of view: start with self and extend outwards: then my life will be fascinating, not a glassed-in cage. If only I could break through in one story. “Johnny Panic” too much a fantasy. If only I could get it real.
A dream last night of my father making an iron statue of a deer, which had a flaw in the casting of the metal. The deer came alive and lay with a broken neck. Had to be shot. Blamed father for killing it, through faulty art. Relation to sick cats around here?
K. A. Porter can’t speak or eat with people when she is writing.…
A horrid priest came to the back door of the mansion yesterday, raw, bright red face looked to have gone under carrot scraper. Black coat, white neckband. Asked for Jim Shannon. I didn’t know where he was. He chewed gum of some sort, harrumphed, rubbed some coins together. Asked me to show him and wife (?) around mansion. I grew cold, said I was not authorized to do so. What are you, a writer? A repulsive ignorant and oddly disgusting man.…
… I am so impatient. Yet the one important thing is to pile up good work. If, IF I could break into a meaningful prose, that expressed my feelings, I would be free. Free to have a wonderful life. I am desperate when I am verbally repressed. Must lure myself into ways and ways of loquacity.… My first job to open my real experience like an old wound; then to extend it; then to invent on the drop of a feather, a whole multicolored bird. Study, study one or two New Yorker’s. Like the now-prolific Mavis G.
Tuesday, September 29. A smoggy rainy day. Somnolent bird twitters. A weight upon me of the prose solidity of the professional storytellers: something I haven’t come near. A lingering breakfast in the garage room: reminiscent of a private dormitory, an institution, a mental home. The waxed linoleum, the straight straw-backed chairs, the ashtrays and bookcases, and mammoth blue-glass grapes. Looked at the two pages of my Pillars story I wrote yesterday and felt disgust at the thinness of them. The glaze again. Prohibiting the density of feeling getting in. I must be so over-conscious of markets and places to send things that I can write nothing honest and really satisfying. My feverish dreams are mere figments; I neither write nor work nor study.
Of course I depend on the mirror of the world. I have one poem I am sure of, the snake one. Other than that, no subjects. The world is a blank page. I don’t even know the names of the pine trees, and, worse, make no real effort to learn. Or the stars. Or the flowers. Read May Swenson’s book yesterday. Several poems I liked: “Snow by Morning” and a fine imagist piece, “At Breakfast,” on the egg. Elegant and clever sound effects, vivid images: but in the poem about artists and their shapes, textures and colors, this seems a mere virtuosity with little root. “Almanac” I liked too, about the world’s history measured by the moon a hammer made on a thumbnail.
I write as if an eye were upon me. That is fatal. The New Yorker rejected my two exercises: as if they knew that’s what they were. Are still “considering” Christmas poem, although I am sure they will not take that. The adrenaline of failure. A black hornet sits on the screen, scratching and polishing its yellowed head. Again the rains fall on rooftops the color of a pool table.
If I could cut from my brain the phantom of competition, the ego-center of self-consciousness, and become a vehicle, a pure vehicle of others, the outer world. My interest in other people is too often one of comparison, not of pure intrigue with the unique otherness of identity. Here, ideally, I should forget the outer world of appearances, publishing, checks, success. And be true to an inner heart. Yet I fight against a simplemindedness, a narcissism, a protective shell against competing, against being found wanting.
To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them. What a gift of the gods.
Create Agatha: a mad, passionate Agatha. Immediately I want her husband to keep bees, and I know nothing of bees. My father knew it all.
How much of life I have known: love, disillusion, madness, hatred, murderous passions.
How to be honest. I see beginnings, flashes, yet how to organize them knowledgeably, to finish them. I will write mad stories. But honest. I know the horror of primal feelings, obsessions. A ten-page diatribe against the Dark Mother. The Mummy. Mother of shadows.
An analysis of the Electra complex.
Wednesday, September 30. When I woke this morning in the dark, humid bedroom, hearing the rain beating down on all sides, it seemed to me I was cured. Cured of the shuddering heartbeat which has plagued these last two days so that I could hardly think, or read, for holding my hand to my heart. A wild bird pulsed there, caught in a cage of bone, about to burst through, shaking my whole body with each throb. I began to want to hit my heart, pierce it, if only to stop that ridiculous throb which seemed to wish to leap out of my chest and be gone to make its own way in the world. I lay, warm, my hand between my breasts, cherishing the surfacing from sleep and the peaceful steady unobtrusive beat of my rested heart. I rose, expecting at every moment to be shaken, and indeed I was not. I have been at rest since waking.…
Began, just yesterday, two pages about the Mummy. If I can do this honestly. Twenty-page chapters out of nightmare land. Then I will pile them up and think about weird quarterlies to take them. They are absolutely uncommercial: no story line, no steady grammar like Paul Engle chooses to be Best American [short story]…. If I can only get some horror into this mother story.
Saturday, October 3.… No poems. The Mummy story dubious. Is it simply feminine frills, is there any terror in it? Would [there] be more if it were real? Set with real externals? As it is, it is the monologue of a madwoman. [No copy of this story has survived.] Dreams: the night before last, a terrible two-day rush to pack for the ship to leave for Europe: missing Ted here, there, the hour passing and me still stuffing odd sweaters and books in my typewriter case. Last night I lived among Jews. Religious service, drinking milk from a gold chalice & repeating a name: the congregation drank milk also at the same time from little cups, I wished they put honey in it. Sitting with three pregnant women. My mother furious at my pregnancy, mockingly bringing out a huge wraparound skirt to illustrate my grossness. P.D.t in this too. Shaving my legs under table: father, Jewish, at head: you will please not bring your scimitar to table. Very odd.…
Sunday, October 4. Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. An occasion of “chatting” with audience much as the occasion with Eliotu will turn out, I suppose. I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.
Finished the Mummy story, really a simple account of symbolic and horrid fantasies. Then was electrified this morning, when I made an effort to come out of my lethargy and actually wash a pile of laundry and my hair, to read in Jung case history confirmations of certain images in my story. The child who dreamt of a loving, beautiful mother as a witch or animal: the mother going mad in later life, grunting like pigs, barking like dogs, growling like bears, in a fit of lycanthropy. The word “chessboard” used in an identical situation: of a supposedly loving but ambitious mother who manipulated the child on the “chessboard of her egotism”; I had used “chessboard of her desire.” Then the image of the eating mother, or grandmother: all mouth, as in Red Riding Hood (and I had used the image of the wolf). All this relates in a most meaningful way my instinctive images with perfectly valid psychological analysis. However, I am the victim, rather than the analyst. My “fiction” is only a naked recreation of what I felt, as a child and later, must be true.
Now, forget salable stories. Write to recreate a mood, an incident. If this is done with color and feeling, it becomes a story. So try recollecting: … Not to manipulate the experience but to let it unfold and recreate itself with all the tenuous, peculiar associations the logical mind would short-circuit.
Tuesday, October 6. Yesterday very bad oppressed. Heavy skies, gray, but with no release. Spent the day writing a syllabic exercise in delicacy about Polly’sv tree. Coy, but rather fun. Read Pound aloud and was rapt. A religious power given by memorizing. Will try to learn a long and a short each day. Best to read them in the morning first thing, review over lunch and catechize at tea. I would have him as a master. The irrefutable, implacable, uncounted uncontrived line. Statement like a whiplash. God.
Of course Henry Holt rejected my book last night with the most equivocal of letters. I wept, simply because I want to get rid of the book, mummify it in print so that everything I want to write now doesn’t get sucked in its maw. Ted suggested: start a new book. All right, I shall start with a snake, and simply send out the old book over and over. Also a wordless, even formless rejection of Max Nix, which does bore me. An inexcusable thing.…