In 1959, Plath worked part-time for the chairman of the department of Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard University, audited Robert Lowell’s poetry writing course at Boston University, and continued therapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher. Plath and Hughes conceived Frieda Rebecca Hughes in June. During the summer, they drove across Canada and the United States to visit Plath’s aunt Frieda Plath Heinrichs and her husband Walter J. Heinrichs in California. From 9 September to 19 November, Plath and Hughes were guests at Yaddo, an artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. They moved back to England in December.
NOTES ON INTERVIEWS WITH RB: 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 & so-there. Better than shock treatment: “I give you permission to hate your mother.”
“I hate her, doctor.” 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 RB’s 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 withold 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 RB up from Paris, London, the wilds of Maine long-distance: “Doctor, can I still go on hating my mother?” “Of course you can: hate her hate her hate her.” “Thank you, doctor. I sure do hate her.”
What do I do? I don’t imagine time will make me love her. I can pity her: she’s had a lousy life; she doesn’t know she’s a walking vampire. But that is only pity. Not love.
On top she is all smarmy nice: she gave herself to her children, and now by God they can give themselves back to her: why should they make her worry worry worry? She’s had a hard life: married a man, with the pre-thirty jitters on her, who was older than her own mother, with a wife out West. Married in Reno. He got sick the minute the priest told them they could kiss. Sick and sicker. She figured he was such a brute she couldn’t, didn’t love him. Stood in the shower forcing herself to enjoy the hot water on her body because she hated his guts. He wouldn’t go to a doctor, wouldn’t believe in God and heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home. She suffered. Married to a man she didn’t love. The Children were her salvation. She put them First. Herself bound to the track naked and the train called Life coming with a frown and a choo-choo around the bend. “I am bloody bloody bloody. Look what they do to me. I have ulcers, see how I bleed. My husband whom I hate is in the hospital with gangrene and diabetes and a beard and they cut his leg off and he disgusts me and he may live a cripple and wouldn’t I hate that. Let him die.” (He died.) “The blood clot hit his brain and wasn’t it lucky he died because what a bother he’d be around the house, a living idiot and me having to support him in addition to the two children.”
She came home crying like an angel one night and woke me up and told me Daddy was gone, he was what they called dead, and we’d never see him again, but the three of us would stick together and have a jolly life anyhow, to spite his face. He didn’t leave hardly enough money to bury him because he lost on the stocks, just like her own father did, and wasn’t it awful. Men men men.
Life was hell. She 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. My mother killed the only man who’d love me steady through life: came in one morning with tears of nobility in her eyes and told me he was gone for good. I hate her for that.
I hate her because he wasn’t loved by her. 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. Damn her eyes.
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.
So mother never had a husband she loved. She had a sick, mean-because-he-was-sick, poor louse, bearded-near-death “Man I knew once”. She killed him (The Father) by marrying him too old, by marrying him sick to death and dying, by burying him every day since in her heart, mind and words.
So what does she 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 and had to disgrace her by going to a mental hospital: bad, naughty ungrateful girl. 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. (She had a lover, didn’t she? She necked and petted and flew to New York to visit Estonian artists and Persian Jew wealthy boys and her pants were wet with the sticky white filth of desire. Put her in a cell, that’s all you could do. She’s not my daughter. Not my nice girl. Where did that girl go?) 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 moneybag 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. Everybody 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 slept with people, 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, her jealousy, her hatred. I feel no love, only the Idea of Love, and that she thinks she loves me like she should. 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 figures 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.
So how do I express my hate for my mother? In my deepest emotions I think of her as an enemy: somebody who “killed” my father, my first male ally in the world. She is a murderess of maleness. I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world. But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself: to keep from being an embarrassment to the ones I loved and from living myself in a mindless hell. How thoughtful: Do unto yourself as you would do to others. I’d kill her, so I killed myself.
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. My brother and I made her sign a promise she’d never marry. When we were seven and nine. Too bad she didn’t break it. She’d be off my neck.
I could pass her in the street and not say a word, she depresses me so. But she is my mother.
What to do with her, with the hostility, undying, which I feel for her? I want, as ever, to grab my life from out under her hot itchy hands. My life, my writing, my husband, my unconceived baby. She’s a killer. Watch out. She’s deadly as a cobra under that shiny greengold hood.
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 re-offered 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? She would take that job teaching English at Smith: if only she had had a chance like that. She said this. She wants to be me: she wants me to be her: she wants to crawl into my stomach and be my baby and ride along. But I must go her way.
I’ll have my own babies, thank you.
I’ll have my own husband, thank you. You won’t kill him the way you killed my father. He has a soul, he has sex strong as it comes. He isn’t going to die so soon. So keep out. Your breath stinks worse than Undertaker’s Basement when it comes to trying to rear a soul in its perfect freedom. You won’t make my husband mad by raving about houses and babies. You won’t make him ashamed by offering me $300 for a course in stenotyping for my birthday (by implication, so I can work and earn money because he probably never will). My husband supports me in soul, body and by feeding me bread and poems. I happen to love him. I can’t hug him enough. I love his work and he fascinates me every minute because he is new and changing minute by minute and making new things every day. He wants me to change and make things too. What I make and how I change is up to me. He says Okay he is glad.
The Man: RB 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. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. 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 any more: I don’t need to look around for anything.
What doesn’t he have? A steady job that brings in seven thousand a year. A private income. All the stuff that lots of money buys. He has his brains, his heat, his love for his work and his talent for it and no fortune and no steady income. How ghastly.
He can and will make money when he wants it and needs it. He won’t put it first, that’s all. Too much else comes first for him. Why should he put money first? I don’t see why.
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 like mother said I would. I did what I felt the one thing and married the man I felt 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. I did just what mother told me not to do: I didn’t compromise. And I was, to all appearances, happy with him, mother thought.
This must baffle mother. How can I be happy when I did something so dangerous as 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 any more. 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 your mother and 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? Where do you look for a mother-person who is wise and who can tell you what you ought to know about facts of life like babies and how to produce them?
The only person I know and trust for this is RB. She 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.
I hate my mother: yet I pity her. How shall I act toward her without feeling a hypocrite? Or cruel?
* * *
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 now hard 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 to 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?
Miscellania: “Does Ted want you to get better?” Yes. He does. He wants me to see RB 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.
RB 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 my mother and 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:
What to do with hate for mother.
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?1
Images of society: the Writer and Poet is excusable only if he is Successful.
Makes Money.
Why do I feel I should have a PhD, 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?
RB: You have always been afraid of premature choices cutting off other choices. Mother’s choices cut her life down to a dry chittering stalk of fear.
NOTEBOOK NOTES
Saturday morning
December 13, 1958
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. Phonecall. Pay bill.
Seen on walk down Atlantic Avenue: A black hearse rounding the corner by the coffee house in a cinder-block garage under a corrugated tin roof. Velvet curtains like at the opera, and patentleather 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 derby’s 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 grey 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. Grey hair, a long vein-mottled face, hollow eyesockets 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 richwood coffin slid into a packing crate of pale wood on a suitecase 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 dark-faced, dark-haired girl at the door with a basket full of Christmas greens and artificial red flowers. Her face brightens: “You bought from me last year.” No, baby, I wasn’t here last year. “Feel.” She holds out a pot, a small earthenware pot full of greens and the big red flowers. “Do you make them yourself?” I ask. A moment’s hesitation: “Yes.” I got Ted. The man decides in this house. No, he said. “Will you help me?” No. We pondered. Misers. Scrooge. Why not give? If we gave, if we gave to the open buckets, the janging bells, we would have nothing for ourselves. We feel too hard-put in a world of money to give to flowerpots of greens: the world is making us worry about work for a living. Yet, if we had money, would give, give. A Puritan sense: they exhibit Christmas sympathies, as do the shops. Besides, her coat looked warmer than mine. Did she notice the ragged holes in Ted’s sweater elbows, his shirt sticking out.
Acorn Street: the shadowed alley cobbled with river stones the sun never shines on. Here the red-jacketed black poodles and silky angora-sweatered pugs lead their masters and mistresses and hump to crap. A Hill of millionaires being led around by fancy dogs looking for a place to crap. A man in black coat and hat follows his pompon eared poodle up the cobbled street halfway. The poodle squats. Good boy. After the poodle is through, the man bends and does something with a newspaper to the fresh turd. Is he sweeping snow over it, like a cat scratches sand over its excrement, neatly, neatly. Or is he gathering up the crap in the newspaper and carrying it home, or to the nearest ashcan? Mysteries never to be penetrated.
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 House. An acceptance of three poems with a charming warm admiring letter from John Lehmann. 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.
Blue shadows of trees looped on the sunwhite snow of the park in Lousyberg Square: the toga-Greek statue clutching his stone sheet in the frost. Clear air. Bless Boston, my birthtown. Give me the guts to begin again here my second quarter century of life and live to the hilt.
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. Warren’s pattern of collapsed romances. My heart aches, dull, frozen: she is ruining him: his dull, secure life: he was good, did what the good woman said, and why should I the naughty one be happy? I am. She begged us to “come and live in her house for awhile if we wanted a change.” She wants to make the most of us, afterall 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.
It snowed this weekend. We woke up, Monday, to see against the far grey mountain range of buildings across the park innumerable white flakes, John Hancock’s blurred totally off the skyline and the snow on the rooftops mounding up, blowing against our windows, and the grind and repetitious slither of car-wheels revolving stuck in our canyon alley. Today, grey skies, but all very light up here with the white snow sharply etched on all the angles of rooftops, gutters, gables, chimneys, and the orange-and-rusty-black chimneypots smoking in small plumes all over lower Beacon Hill. The river basin thick almost luminous white.
Have been happier this week than for six months. It is as if RB 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? One feels that is mother’s secret life-philosophy: the minute you dare to be happy fate smacks you a low blow: about Warren’s romance (he got a letter yesterday & read it to mother over the phone, a letter “making everything all right”) “That’s just the way my life was, the minute you think things are bad enough, something awful happens to make it worse.” 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-bourgeois platitudes usually used up on trivia. The accepting 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. Ted & 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 Golightly left me more chilly than when I read her.
Harvard couple at Gerta’s2 party & Fassett’s3 afterward: a great cowish Norwegian wife, daughter of a seacaptain, who in certain lights and angles looked beautiful, notably in profile, with a strong nose, fair complexion, glinty blond hair, and mink coat; I think it was mink, a sparky slithery fur. I kept thinking she must be beautiful, but then her heavy chin, almost round full face got in the way, her stuckout stomach (another baby) and thick legs; then she became cowish. She talked of her husband to Ted; I talked to the husband. He doesn’t like animals, not “doesn’t like”, but just “doesn’t care”; Agatha’s remarkable tiger kitten did some amazing skippings and dancings and attacked Bimbo, who knocked the kitten down with a paw and seemed about to eat him till the kitten writhed & mewled pitiably and rolled off; Scylla, the mother, on the way to the kitten to solace it, stalked past the reclining Bimbo and, as an afterthought, gave him a malicious, vengeful cuff. Startling; not the revenge, so much as the thought-out retention of anger, the wait between the act and the cuff. This egg-head, Richard Gill,4 tutor in Economics at Leverett House, looked blankly at the kitten as if a chair were simply moving from one place to another in a house full of walking chairs and so what. I feel a whole level of sensibility is missing in people like this. He hates traveling, went to Harvard for a BA, got his PHD from Harvard, lives and teaches at Harvard now, not just in town, but in a dormitory; dotes on his children, hates to travel. His wife says he can’t find his way anywhere, not even to the Beacon Hill Kitchen when they lived on the Hill, so she had to pick him up at home and lead him there, never meet him there. He talks solely of himself. He has had stories in the Atlantic, and the New Yorker wrote and asked for some, and he publishes there. Knows and dotes on Frank O’Connor, took his course in writing, then assisted him for two years. “A story must have a character that bends, like a crowbar. Some outside incident must send him off in another, very different direction from which he is going in at the beginning of the story.”
Advice. I must take it. Just what I need: character changes. That is “plot”. Theme.
People: Mrs. McKee, Mrs. Doom: expect the worst: relation to Greek tragic chorus. Expects worst of human nature: sad feeling of having lived up to the worst she expects, by throwing away the pie server, laughing at her. She is drawn by misfortune, draws it to her. Does she also draw the worst in people out? Is it, in the end, her fault for being as she is, not fate’s fault? The collection of frogs, knicknacks, magazines. Daughter’s suicide attempt. Son’s failing out of schools. Red sport’s cars. Episode of rug, landlady; hunting for pie server; minute description of the pond. The Pie-Server Incident
The Champion Spinach-Picker: Ilo Pill, artist; introduction to sex. Background of farm. Honesty. Mary Coffee. Sense of shame. Stupid faith. Tempting of danger. Revelation: limits. “Lord knows how mother got my brother and me the farm-jobs, but she managed it.” DPs. Estonians. Negroes.
I-stories about Winthrop. Recreate town. Father, atheist; the Catholic Conways, and Lalleys. Jimmy Beale, Jimmy Booth, Sonney, Sheldon: the Jews. Penitentiary.
Paul Roche: his green suit and green eyes; the great sponger; get him in, wife, children: revelation about him.
NOTEBOOK
Wednesday am
December 17
A LHJ story, The Button Quarrel? Ask RB 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. 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 RB 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 witholding 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,5 “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 (eg, 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. I hate my mother, therefore 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.
Marcia and Mike: Unpleasant: the hidden corpse of Amedee grows with meaning.
[Six sentences omitted by ed.]
Both of us must feel partly that the other isn’t filling a conventional role: he isn’t “earning bread and butter” in any reliable way, I’m not “sewing on buttons and darning socks” by the hearthside. He hasn’t even got us a hearth; I haven’t even sewed a button.
Friday morning: December 26, 1958:
About to see Beuscher. 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 pity and 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.
Problem: knowing what we want: conflicting wants. Country versus city, America versus England and Europe, expensive tastes versus no money, lots of children versus no help.
If I can build up 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.
NOTEBOOK
December 27, 1958
Saturday
Yesterday had a session with Beuscher 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 something I have only recently begun to admit isn’t there: a mother’s love. Nothing I do (marrying, saying “I have a husband so I really didn’t want yours”; writing: “here is a book for you, it is yours, like my toidy products and you can praise and love me now”) can change her way of being with me which I experience as a total absence of love. What, then, do I expect in the way of love? Do I feel what I expect when I see RB? 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: eg 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.
RB; 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.
WHY DON’T I FEEL SHE LOVES ME? 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 & 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 a sad old woman. Not a witch.
A fear also that she might appropriate Ted as hers and kill him, or kill him through me? In spirit or maleness is as bad as physically. For me he is infinitely preservable.
Is our desire to investigate psychology a desire to get Beuscher’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. She will use it as she has always used it, but this must not upset me. 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: she has lost both man and happiness and had to make do with Warren and me substituted for the man, and our happiness substituted for her own.
My happiness in certain ways is not useable for her: it goes against her pronouncements and implies she is wrong, or was wrong. She envies me for what I have done. It reflects back on her past and suggests she is to blame for what happened to herself, for not making a better choice on this and that. Re my announcement of the Smith offer repeated: I only wish somebody would offer me a job like that.
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. When she dies, what will I feel? I wish her death so 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.
WHY HAVE I PERSISTED IN THE DELUSION THAT I COULD WIN HER LOVE (APPROVAL) TILL SUCH A LATE DATE? NOTHING I DO WILL CHANGE HER. DO I GRIEVE NOW BECAUSE I REALIZE THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THIS?
What little maxim can I repeat to myself to get my writing going under the proper auspices?
I resent her too because she has given me only useless information about life in the world, and all the useful woman-wisdom I must seek elsewhere and make up for myself. Her information is based on a fear for security and all advice pushes toward the end and goal of security and final answers.
The ash bits from the black wired box seiving the red-brick chimney soot are winking and somersaulting down, bright white like snowflakes in the shadow of the building, caught by the sun. This I enjoy.
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 HATE FOR MOTHER? Does the need to express it recede with a mature awareness I can’t expect love from her, therefore will not hate her for not giving it? Does all hate pass off into benevolent pity?
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. Like my saga with the wise Louise. 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. This week. We had a very good f’ing. Enormously good, perhaps the best yet. 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 old own 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 RB 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?
December 28
Sunday
Before nine. Oatmeal eaten, 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.
How to recognize a story? There is so much experience but the real outcome tyrannizes over it. Louise, or this girl, has a terrific capacity for tolerating experience. What she can’t tolerate is his having an experience she can’t have. What does this motivate her to do? Sleep with another man. How can you know a man is potent unless you sleep with him before you’re married. She has learned about contraception. How does this experience change her? Emergency Ward, she loses her virginity. Symbolic act to match experience of fiancee. Roommate wise about men. Divorce is a reason for testing people out before you’re married to them. Influence of roommate. Payment of hospital, by deflowerer. How does this end?
Went to library yesterday afternoon with Ted. Looked up requirements for a PhD in psychology. It would take about six years. A prodigious prospect. Two years for prerequisites, languages for MA. 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.
The main theme: hanging is the symbolic rejection of fictitious goodness. Feeling of badness in world unconquerable by good: war, death, disease: horror radio programs. Badness in self. Johanna a scapegoat: model of goodness. How do you defend yourself in case of attack? By fighting back. Johanna doesn’t fight back; is helpless, foolish. Change of ethic in child. Sees something more problematic than mother makes it. Leroy: Maureen, participate. Where does guilt lie? In Johanna? Games: psychodrama. Close relation of girl and father.
NOTEBOOK
December 31
Wednesday
The last day of 1958: clear and heavenly blue: the day, bland, offers beauty: all weathers are lovely, if only the inner weather reflects and endows loveliness. A question: do I love laziness more than I love the feeling of accomplishing work (writing, learning German, French; studying)? It seems that way. I take the path of least resistance and curl up with a book. Everyone else seems to be doing valuable work: social work, cancer research, teaching, degree getting, mothering. What can I do?
Have been working on the Leroy-biting story, without much idea where it will end: yet as I write, day by day, two pages or so, and brood, new ideas come up. The hanging of Johanna Bean promises not to come in here at all. A story must have a SINGLE THEME: although a theme can be underlined by related material. My present theme seems to be the awareness of a complicated guilt system whereby Germans in a Jewish and Catholic community are made to feel, in a scapegoat fashion, the pain, psychically, the Jews are made to feel in Germany by Germans without religion. The child can’t understand the larger framework. How does her father come into this? How is she guilty for her father’s deportation to a detention camp? As this is how I think the story must end? Johanna will come in on her own with the trapeze, Uncle Frank, and the fiction of perfect goodness. Also, the story about “The Little Mining Town In Colorado”. My writing is quite uncolored. Is the interest in it only mine?
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. DN’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 St. Therese’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 it’s own way is perverse as greed for happines 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.
[Appendix 10 contains Sylvia Plath’s December 1958 list of words and names (entry 42a), notes about Top Withens (entry 42b), notes about Saint Thérèse de Lisieux and Saint Teresa of Avila (entries 44–46), notes for Plath’s poems ‘The Bull of Bendylaw’, ‘Point Shirley’, and ‘Goatsucker’ (entry 47); Appendix 11 contains a fragment from ‘Point Shirley’ (entry 41) – ed.]
NOTEBOOK
January 3, 1959
Saturday
As usual after an hour with RB, 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 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 McLean I had an inner life going on all the time but wouldn’t admit it. If I had know 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 RB? 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 dont 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.
NOTEBOOK
January 7, 1959
Wednesday
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 dust and wash and feel life is as it should be helps.
Boston is filthy: a drift of weekly soot on the windows, the windows smeared with greasy cooking exhalations, dust under the bed and all over, appearing miraculously every day, thrown and shaken out the window, and seeping in again.
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 housecleaning (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 (nine), 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, dessicating 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 LHJ or NY story, and I will be poreless and radiant. My wart will be non-malignant.
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 liveable in, a heater in the ratty house.
Read Aino 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 Johanna 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.
NOTEBOOK
january 8
Thursday
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 Phd. 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’s6 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.
Every now and then I get the feeling I could do a good work. Yet what have I done. What I have done, nonetheless, is quite good, some of it, and with work I should do better. One indication: one story accepted. Lord knows what is happening to me: I am dying of inertia.
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. Any way, 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 Fassett in it, stiff and sad. Walking by grave-stones, 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. But I wonder: he says “get a job” as if it were a prison sentence. 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 fairytales.
NOTEBOOK
January 10
Saturday
Almost eleven. The infuriating irregular noise of the electricians snaking their wire up the column beside my sink, rolling the wire downstairs. There can be only two more apartments on our side to fix, but the noise is deafening. How disruptions annoy. They shouldn’t but they do: anything an excuse can hinge onto. At least we don’t live on the bottom floor: they must hear all eight floors being fixed.
I have proceeded very little distance in my resolution. I am at least making the oatmeal and coffee, but this morning, after a late night yesterday with Marty & Mike & Roger & Joan Stein7 we slept till 9:30.
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 her 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 MEChase, Lesbians, (what does a woman see in another woman that she doesn’t see in a man: tenderness). I am also afraid of MEC: 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 RB 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 grey 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 Phd in English & teach poetry.
Talked also with RB 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. Expecting mother to see how it really feels to be a mother. She not able to oblige.
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, 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 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 come away with more questions than when I go in. Will send her a check at the end of the month.
The rejection a blow. Sanctions my utter lack of faith which puts me in a despair. Shows the writing for itself is not first. Yet what joys, loves I have known. And how they are part of the world.
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.
The noise, the noise: is this the last cable? A fury of anger and frustration and self-pity.
Felt a joy yesterday, soon clouded.
NOTEBOOK
January 10, 1959
Saturday
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. The mailman wrinkled it by jamming it in the box. Must speak to him.
January 20, 1959
WEDnesday
Peculiar peace this morning: all is grey and dripping wet. We have a new cat whose needs and miaows are becoming 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 muddled week. Warren for a good dinner Saturday, roast beef, creamed spinach in broth, and a superb lemon meringue pie. A movie at the Brattle with the magnificent moueish Giulietta Massina, the Nights of Cabiria. Not the single power and terror of La Strada, but excellence, humor, her beauty and sudden raffish down-lippings. Sunday, a walk rapidly to T-wharf, the stench, the docked ships. Back to C—–’s cave-like cool long apartment which I love, the expensive furniture and openness: talk, with a visiting Bennington senior working her stint in boston, the olive, long face, blue-black Jewish hair in a back braid, like Esther Brooks’ hair, a kind of thick woven blue and white serape, black and grey striped tapered slacks and bare ankles, little pointy black leather Italian shoes. A weak kindly escort, Ed Cohn, too gentle, too sweet and soft. Qualms about the PhD. C—–’s fearsome veering: the affair with the married architect next door (“his wife tried to kill me, to strangle me”) and the simultaneous “I don’t want to sound fickle but” she’d marry an associate professor of Columbia in Sociology at the drop of a proposal. She would do it, too. How curious one is about these friends committed to other lives, and what they will choose and do.
Monday, to Rosalind Wilson’s to get the cat: a warm basketful by the fireplace, all drowsing, prowling on furry rugs. We took the littlest livest tiger.
A moment with Elizabeth Harkwicke8 and Robert Lowell: she charming and highstrung, mimicking their subnormal Irish housegirl 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 others a dry turd. Lowell’s half-whisper and sliding glance. Peter Brooks,9 his tall wrinkled soft kind charming face, falling here and there, nerves: his iceblue eyed pouty blonde ballerina wife, Gerta K. saying to her “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’s 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.
Very tired after late night with Lowell. Argument with Agatha, very silly: her argument with Steve, snatching a record out of his hand. I see both points, Agatha’s emotionally and Steve’s considered and by far more sanely balanced one. And love them both.
With Ted: only utter faith and belief, and my own work. I make up problems, all unnecessary. I do not reverence the present time. Tomorrow: Ask RB 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.
My projects falter. I will go from now on to the library and read for four hours every afternoon: no phone, no visitors. That will give me a peace. Will study German. This is a main wish and concern.
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 VanOrden. Sometimes life seems so meanderingly pleasant. And then I castigate myself for laziness. For not working for a PhD like J. or on a third book like ACR 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-prevalant sloth.
NOTEBOOK
January 27
Tuesday
The world in itself, with its gentle siftings of white snow, the first real snow yet, on the rooftops, pleating and patching, blurring with the plumes of chimney smoke and vanishing into a close grey distance with John Hancock and the Charles River Basin – – – all this is more than these mean, crooked eyes deserve.
A month of the New year evaporated. Read Wilbur10 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, desert wine.
I speak with RB 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. Mother with her usual miffed, tragic look, dropped by a book. I didn’t ask her up. 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 RB 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 selfinterested 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 Hardwickes stories at the library. I want their success without their spirit or work.
How externals seem to fill worlds of people like Shirley N.11 Her baby, its walks and talks, her making of rugs and her skating and swimming. What cares she for any spirit or religion: it isn’t an issue: social life is what she does. I am panicked at the separation from Mother Academia, although I remember I thought I’d never get through studying for exams. The challenge of marrying a man whose way of life is what I admire and want and am too lazy to live up to. I do no German, no French. Is this because it is easier for me to complain I don’t do it than to do it?
Frittered an afternoon at Agatha’s: twilight, after listening to the dull-reading Wilbur, the gimicky Cummings, all sentimentality gliding up and down the scale, none of his early solid poems, All In Green My Love Went Riding, and the satires. Tea and sweet cake and the twilit gossip, with the cats licking sugar crumbs from their lips: her frantic debate with a smug German psychoanalyst who excused the Nazis, Hitler (he was thwarted in school, all bad things begin with good intentions). Her running, tearing her hair, moaning. Her wearing a thick coat always in the house, like a caul, a womb-sack. She is mad, hysterical. Her opinions are emotional statements, woe to the one who misses the current. Must make a reading list. Have read two Brecht plays: always a surprise, a shock and pleasure: the dramatizing of “issues” embodied in the real world. Good, good. Will begin to make a rug today. To step on.
NOTEBOOK
January 28
Wednesday
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 ACRich 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 snowfilled sky, smoke greyblack against pale twilight sky coming back. Brought my bundle of woolens and began to make the braided rug: immense pleasure cutting the good thick stuffs, 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 highchair, 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 womentalk. 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.
Read and translate at library in the afternoon. Last night I took a shower and braided on my rug while listening to Beethovens second symphony. Maybe I will learn something.
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 Beuscher 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-drop gloom with RB yesterday. She said I don’t work as well 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. It is seven thirty. We have had orange juice, oatmeal, coffee for the first time in weeks of late sloppy risings and Ted’s exile to the library. 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 cant.
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?
Sent Johnny Panic to Accent. Just to get it printed would give me a lift. Hornbook took “The Bull of Bendylaw”: an auspice for my book at the Yale thing? I need to get rid of these poems some way.
Am going to Marty’s this morning but never again anything in the morning except RB: my sunday confession.
The cat trying to get into my lap: it is spoiled by loving & hugging.
Shirley’s story: her telling Mrs. N all about sex, Mrs. N reading sex books and telling her something helpful about women getting climaxes, which the indefatigable Mrs. N gets at fifty and after. “Did it help?” “Shirley tells me everything.” The idealization of Dick, her favorite son, and Joanne,12 who can do no wrong: they go to New York, they sail, and no one worries about the money: Mrs. N’s borrowings of cribs and scales and toidy seats for Shirley’s baby. Making her feel ashamed. The terrible mother. Dick and Joanne’s measured three-hour shift visits to both pairs of parents. The “hunting for the oar” at twilight.
C—–’s sicknesses, calling Marty. Her affair with the married architect, moving out of the house. Stories from mad points of view. Free myself. The guilt, need for punishment is absurd. I am a victim of original sin, which is the natural human sloth, part of the human predicament. The cat stands up like a woodchuck in my lap and licks the space bar as if that would keep me loving it on my lap.
Stanley Kunitz,13 his bright white Cambridge apartment with the blood-red burlap curtains and the violent depthless red-accented paintings of his New Greenwich Village wife, who called him: Uh-huh, uh-huh, bye honey. His queer astigmatism, dismissing all poets but himself and the old Roethke and Penn Warren, especially women, whose success must be particularly distasteful to him. The experience of the New England Poetry Society meeting, their spending two hours on their little reading of members trash, tea, a hare-lipped Poetry Editor of the Saturday Evening post advising about submissions, before letting Kunitz read and then the unanswered telephone outside the door ringing throughout. Dinner at the horrible Hotel Commander with Isabella Gardner and the Fassets and Kunitz and fur-sleeved gross-faced Gerta.
February 19
Thursday
The North Wind doth blow. Grey and the snowflakes blowing suddenly like bits of white paper. Ann Hopkins14 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, and 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 ACR. A fury of frustration, some inhibition keeping me from writing what I really feel. I began a poem on “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)15 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 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.
Typing frees me. Before Beuscher I obviously shall not write, so shall try writing letters. Courage, courage. It is as if I have been pushing myself so hard for so many years, I am slack once the outer demand is gone, resting only, I hope. Then to work on German and French. If I could work into prose, I might be able to whip my life into better shapes. Have tried getting up at 6:30 most mornings this week and Ted is happier, and I also. Even if I don’t write. Part of it is I feel I should add a couple of powerful poems to the volume I am sending off to the Yale Contest this next week and this paralyses me. Better send the book off and free myself of it.
Try writing one page of talk every day. Enchanting child at Arthur and Geraldine (Kohlenberger?):16 her Fuzzy Bronco, the queer stub-faced cats. Like another animal. Engel’s17 second novel: there will be a great silence about it. Yes, that would be worst.
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 roof tops and the sun on it and the sky a high clear blue bell jar.
Lousy dreams. Forget last nights. 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 legstumps and lower legs scattered. I believe they were supposed to dig their own graves on the 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 RB 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 ACRich 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 BU 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 student’s 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 LHJ 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.
Reason I didn’t like Monroe Engel on first look was his Harvard position and resemblance to the head of the WW committee. And his appointment is not renewed and his novel not reviewed. My god. The poor man.
O to break out into prose.
Saturday
February 28
7:30, a fog closing in, all the buildings melted away except the rooftops and chimneys immediately below the window. The mists of error. Stayed in bed yesterday with this peculiar fatigue I am sure comes from a weariness that I have no story plots and do not make any up. I have the time to write and am piling up brick by brick, a guilt. Yet I have written two good poems, better in their way, particularly the last, than any I have written: Point Shirley, and Suicide Off Egg Rock. Why can’t I bring love back into my poems: start even with persona, if I am afraid.
Nightmare before going to RB 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. Murderous emotions in a child can’t be dealt with through reason, in an adult they can.
Read Faulkner yesterday, after Tostoi’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. The Bear a magnificent story except for the infuriating, confused (deliberately and unneedfully) fourth section, a bumbling apocalyptic rant about landownership and God and Ikkemotubbe and such rot. The rest, a clear, honest recreation of an archetypal image, the great Bear with the man’s name, who is, in his way, large as Moby Dick.
Fog blowing by the window in great poufs now.
Try to get into a story. Forget self and give blood to creation.
NOTEBOOK
Monday, March 9
After a lugubrious session with RB, 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 NY and see what they think.
A clear blue day in Winthrop. Went to my father’s grave, a very depressing sight. Three grave yards 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.
Walked over rocks along the oceanside under Water Tower Hill. Out on the sandbar I found the same colony of thick white and orangey snailshells. Got wet-footed and frigid handed collecting. Ted out at the end of the bar, in black coat, defining the distance of stones and stones humped out of the sea. Walked the seawall to Deer Island: hey, you can’t go any farther, the guard said. We talked to the young chap in the hexagonal house on the shore, like a summerhouse, a glassed-in bandstand. Glimpsed the floral pattern of a comfortable armchair inside. He told us there was a piggery on the island, an chickens and cattle and, in the summer, corn, beans and garden greens. Gossiped about high realestate on the shore, his seniority on the job, the easy three to eleven shift. Came back & followed fire engines down Cornhill where there had been a great fire, which was still smouldering. The gutted brick building was blackened and hollow, smoke fanning in spasmodic whiffs from the eaves. Icicles hung from all the windowledges.
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 PhD 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 Journal stories. Maybe some good pregnant poems, if I know I really am.
March 20
Friday
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. Especially with Marty’s troubles and adopting a child, and Shirley’s second one on the way: I’d like four in a row. Then dopey, and the cramps all day. I am getting nowhere with RB. 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 cartharsis 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.
Then a brooding soup lunch and a horrid afternoon at work: made two mistakes in the income tax letters which must be typed over & spelt a word wrong I’d asked for twice on an applications blank. Very annoying. He had got me coffee too. Wicked self. Well, he was fool enough to hire me. I felt doped, grumpy. RB said cramps are all mental after arguing against natural childbirth, saying pain was real.
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 Ann Sexton,18 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 pony tail. Will no doubt go out and get a pageboy cut as of old. Is it money keeps me back? Must get fixed up before I go to Holyoke. Four weeks that gives me.
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.
Desire for intellectual career. Have not touched German: to learn that would be a great triumph for me. The morning is fresh & blue. Incredible months ahead, of clearness. Produce, produce. To get the Yale thing would be good. No word from the Guggenheim. If not Yale this year, Lamont the next.
Do odds & ends today. Old panic back yesterday. What am I and what am I doing in world? Write another NYorker story. Or any story. Look up German concentration, I mean American detention camps. Read TS Eliot.
Finished the Tolkien trilogy. A triumph. A battle of the pans and kevas. I don’t know when I have been so moved.
Sunday
March 29
Sitting here on a blue clear cold morning, Easter, I believe, and the risen Christ meaning only a parable of human renewal and nothing of immortality. My hair resembling its old self but newly cut in too-short bangs. The old brooding stasis of prose: I am full, but paralyzed to know what to do with it: to say: a New Yorker or Journal story only stiffens me. I must do them for the fun of it.
An article-story: the Day I Died. And one of C—–’s intrigues, The Alley: John Singer Sargent’s mistress, Miss Salley. Egan and his mad child-wife.
A pleasanter day at my job this last, with the great grey-crewcutted DHH Ingalls19 giving me two offprints of articles on Sanskrit poetry. Meeting Ted for beer afterwards & he working on his fox story anthology for the first time.
I want to begin my Bed Book. Something freezes me from my real spirit: is it fear of failure, fear of being vulnerable? I must melt it. I will get out some more children’s book this week. I would rather publish this than a book of poems.
Lovely supper with Marcia and Mike on the depressing day we realized we’d done the wrong thing about the Guggenheim budget: and Ted getting into what Booth said were the final finals: a horror, we didn’t demand enough and said we weren’t going to Rome, thinking: they’ll never give it us to go back to England. So we wrote back, changed budget and added Rome again, and now are hopeless: they’ll think us ridiculous and vacillating and not give the money. Maybe, though, his letter was a letter of warning: giving us time to change? O o o. C—– waiting also for grants; Marcia and Mike glowing, about adopted baby in the offing?
Here are stories: the beautiful popular girl who can’t get married. The homeloving childloving couple who cant have children. O yes, and the born-writer who can’t write.
Got at some deep things with Beuscher: 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?
Made, after Marcia, an elegant and delectable refrigerator cheesecake. All rots, however. These witless clear mornings. If I could get into prose, into children’s books, it would be a salvation. If I could have simple fun doing it.
Thursday
April 23
As with April, spring manifests itself in joyous news. I am tired, having got up and out of Ted’s work-room 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 farthest thousand, $5,000, which seems incredibly princely to us. After an invitation to Yaddo 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 Watercolor of Granchester 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 at 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 Ann 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 grey (Companionable Ills, Owl) have a verve and life-joy.
I am still blocked about prose. A novel still scares me. Have been reading “Passage to India” for the first time and admiring the miraculous flow and ease of it. To have the time to show the placing of a red card on a black, the change of daylight and the geography of certain hills: the blessings of the novelists wide untidy landscape art. It would be a certain therapy. But if I do some good stories, that is the way toward the mountain. I do not yet do them.
I think too much yet about What Kind they should be and Where I should publish them. Poems now are an evasion too. I have my book as such and must not take the easy way of sitting a morning before a poem in evasion from my children’s Bed Book which I long and yet fear to begin. Part of my passiveness. If you are dead, no one can criticize you, or, if they do, it doesn’t hurt.
The “dead black” in my poem may be a transference from the visit to my father’s grave.
Worked and worked with Beuscher: 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. Weary still from the absolutely deadening weekend in Northampton and Holyoke. The strain of Stanley’s intolerable position. How to overcome my naivete 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. A story on the hospital. About the affair of Starbuck20 & Sexton. A double story, August Lighthill and the Other Women. Also about the children, seen through Jan’s eyes. 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!
April 25
Saturday
Clear day, dragged up as usual early, but exhausted, too much so to write, so worked on polishing up essay on Withens only to be stopped in title from final typing by not knowing spelling Withens or Withins.
Two visits yesterday: to Mrs. Lamb, the terrible invalid downstairs who has lived in her small two-room apartment for 25 years and not been out of her room for two years. Her great monstrous fat body propped on a worn green plush chair with oddly high legs, so her elephantine legs, in thick beige stockings, could be propped on a footstool. The little cleaning woman (“so poor, just herself and her sister, they have nothing. I gave her some icecream my taximan brought today”) going out as I came in seemed to have accomplished nothing. A sickening smell of medecines, stuffiness, old lady-sweat, as of rooms not opened for years. Dusty black telephones appeared in every corner, obviously so she wouldn’t have to put herself out unduly to answer them. She wore a navyblue dress over her bulk with white buttons, innumerable white buttons, marching down the front and holding the material together with effort, little looped openings pulling at every notch. Her big-jowled face rested on her chest, queerly warted, and her greasy grey-yellowed hair hung in short strings (“I wanted to have a hairdresser come permanent it today, but she couldn’t come, I hope you don’t mind”). The smell gave me a headache. The room itself seemed a nightmare, an impossibility below our clean bright sweet-smelling place, and the more of a nightmare in being identical in shape with it. In spite of the cleaning woman, an oppressive sense of filth. Between Mrs. Lamb’s high chair and the window were piles of dusty papers, mementos, boxes, from which she rummaged old pictures of her son, her grandchildren, her daughter in Egypt, dressed in jodphurs, taking pictures of the natives on the desert, and pictures of herself as an unbelievably attractive young girl in an hourglass dress, pouty and sultry, with, as her negro maid said “A Mae West figure”. The old, dark surface of the photo, taken 50 years ago? Cast me into a pool of reveries, that such beauty should come to such a horrid mountain of immovable flesh, unable, because of her fat, to move out of her room for four years.
The room: exactly like ours, but repulsive. A black swatch of blistered paint on the icebox, and black soot and grease smears fanning away from the stove on the walls and ceilings, the window frames hanging with soot and the windows too smeared to see through. A little fake green christmas tree with soapflakes and tinsel stood on a small table beside a clock. Bare floor, no rugs. She came from the family of Shaws, her son married a Shaw (no relation) and her daughter (about 45?) had a young man, also a Shaw, Louis Agassiz Shaw (Junior), and her daughter-in-laws uncle, or father, was also, oddly enough, named Louis Agassiz Shaw. I shuddered to think of the state of the bedroom. She severed the muscles of her legs in jumping out of a car and stepping on a board walk unfastened at one end. Stories of burglars upstairs, her dog Crumpet saved from asphyxiation at the Animal Rescue League, the Count and Countess de Longay in our apartment, an old glassed-in bookcase: Castles of England. Daughter came, warm, solid, much improved atmosphere; left after two hours.
A Day of Yawns after a fantastic spell of work from coffee to midnight last night. I am now hungrily putting the last minutes of cooking onto breaded veal in cream, green parsley rice and rather soggy yellow squash, and very weary. Washed hair. Retyped pages, a messy job, on the volume of poems I should be turning in to Houghton Mifflin this week. But AS is there ahead of me, with her lover GS 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 meagre candle flame, drawn. That is over. As 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 has 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. I have two ideas, one about a Lonesome Park and the other about a Town on a Very Steep Hill (for Christmas or Easter). Maybe I can work out one of those before I get my first rejection of the ms. Suddenly it frees me – – – and Ted too. I can go to the magazine rack this morning and get a NY Times, a NYorker, a Writers 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.
The Monitor’s accepting my first article “The Kitchen of the Fig Tree” for the Home Forum Page opened up a vista of $50 checks for an extension of my letter-writing habits. I have “A Walk to Withins” written and ready, and an idea for “Watching the Water Voles.” They are Christian Scientist in their religious article and rather pagan on the rest of the page.
Read article on radium-dial painters, doomed in the amazingly radium-stupid 20’s to die of internal radiation, in the NYorker. A STORY by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The usual flawlessly realized stuff with a pathos-or-bathos point “The Quality of Mercy”. I think I could, with work and thought, write for them. But am far far from it. This week have kept all mornings free and must work on my Sweetie Pie story and figure what it’s about. Sometimes, with the NYorker, I’m not so sure that matters! My joy now will be my first Children’s Book accepted, and my first New Yorker story. All this throws the lugubrious balance away from my book of poems which may well improve by more maturing. If it only won the Yale, all would be fine. This year, I think, is a year of maturing. I am joyous in affirming my writing at last.
Wednesday
May 13, 1959
How many mornings pass like this one? Seed-time, I say. I read my notebooks on Spain, take out a leaflet about “The Discontented Mayor” (prodded by an Esquire article on Spain) and browse and muse over working it up into a short-short vignette for Esquire or possibly Mlle. About to turn to that infuriating story which isn’t sure of its own point “Sweetie Pie & The Gutter Men”. Very good possibilities, if only I can get it out of its last-summer fix. Wrote a pretty-pretty poem yesterday “In Midas’ Country”, one of those ideal New Yorker pieces. Ironic to see if they buy/ Wish I’d hear from “Johnny Panic”: I think that is publishable. Cooler and grey, with that city-canyon wetness after a spring rain.
Bothered about RB: 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.
Ten, the clocks strike. Yesterday was tropical: rain, fearful humidity, sweating, low ragged wet clouds, heat lightning. We tossed till midnight when a cooler air set in.
Mailed the ms. of Ted’s Children’s Book “Meet My Folks!” both to Harper’s and Faber’s. This book should sell like hotcakes. I reread my notes about Ted’s children’s fables written three summers ago in Spain, how they should be a classic, and now see how obviously unsalable they were in such form, and hope my judgments have matured as I think they have. Well, in my book of 45 poems there are only 10 surviving of the book I sent Auden at the Yale Series two summers ago. And I have written a lot more than 35 since then, too.
Now, to see what work I can accomplish before I leave for RB.
Monday
May 18
Set-back last week. Got Monitor article on watervoles rejected which I too lightly and confidently predicted would earn me an easy $50. I am not wise to even such a common market? It did me good. I got mad, then grim, then industrious and resigned. Finished, all of a piece, “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men” which has been on my back for about, almost, a year. Have ideas, ideas. I think it is a damn good story. Much more accomplished, working three characters, conversation, than “Johnny Panic” which I have not got back from Accent yet, sent sometime last fall. Am waiting to get name of story editor of NY from Stanley. It will be by far the best story I have sent them yet.
Ted & I have our two children’s books sent off, not a word, of course, yet. His to Harper’s and Faber’s, mine to the Atlantic Press. I have rumbling ideas for “The Lonesome Park”, only must figure how to get people in it.
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 ceremonial 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 pocketmoney in their pocketbooks. One daughter was large, blond, freckled, Arden Tapley, only how changed from her innocent youth. Dreamt also George Starbuck had a book of poems published by Houghton Mifflin, a spectacular book, full of fat substantial poems I hadn’t seen, called “Music Man”. The endpapers were decorated as in a childrens book, ducks, colored Jack Horners, etc. He also send an envelope full of profound jottings on scraps of paper: To my dear friends. Zany epigrams and the like.
Worked on my braided rug the last two days after a stall of a couple of months. A lovely thing, the rich new blues and reds and red-and-black weaves I got with Shirley. Looks like a stained glass window. Shall risk having it cleaned today, I think.
Idea for novel, still titled Falcon Yard: story of three women, or mainly one: C—–, with her illegitimate baby and mental hospital, just as Marty, her closest tagalong friend was discovering she couldn’t have a baby. Story of C—–’s alley, which will be named Falcon Yard. Much easier to work up because not personal. At Yaddo? Must read more contemporary novels.
Last night, down Hanover Street by all the elaborate Italian florists, with their great paper bouquets of flowers, heart-shaped and scalloped, and the innumerable pastery shops with seven-tiered wedding cakes, came upon “Moon Street”. A poem or story deserves that name.
Wednesday
May 20th
All I need now is to hear that GS or MK21 has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children’s book. AS has her book accepted at HM and this afternoon will be drinking champagne. Also an essay accepted by PJHH,22 the copy-cat. But who’s to criticize a more successful copy-cat. Not to mention a poetry reading at McLean. And GS at supper last night smug as a cream-fed cat, very pleased indeed, for AS is in a sense his answer to me. And now my essay, on Withins, will come back from PJHH, and my green-eyed fury prevent me from working. Or 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 B (am very ashamed to tell her of immediate jealousies – – – the result of my extra-professional 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 has had a similar experience, getting ahead of me. Well, what to do when this surges up 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.
Braided violently on rug, which is at cleaner’s, and felt anger flow harmlessly away into the cords of bright soft colored wool. It will be not a prayer rug but an anger rug. Only hope the cleaner’s today do a good job. That is a relief, to have that to do. Think I will go to the sailing place. By myself.
Monday
May 25
Again, again, the grumpy fruitless cramps. The two or three odd days of hope blasted and all to begin again. My Maudlin poem is a prophetic little piece. I get the pleasure of a prayer in saying it: Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man. Of course it would wait till today, when I was going to make lunch at Marcia’s (which I shall call to cancel) then my job at Harvard then the Poetry Society with the triumphant AS & GS and then dinner with Hitchen23 and some woman or other which I shall have to cook up. Oh crud. The two things I would like are a book (or story in the NY) accepted and a baby. After all my surmising about Marcia and Mike I don’t feel like going through anything similar myself. Must not be accusing, although I feel like it.
Max24 came yesterday. Odd, how I dislike him. A horrible rich unction to his voice. A mental effort to say he may be exemplary, but his aura is all wrong. I couldn’t look at him. He made me sick. Short, too-white skin, red hair, a sense of flabbiness, not any bite or grit. I don’t want to see him again. Except that I would like to see where my father went to school in Wisconsin.
The gripes don’t let up in spite of aspirin. Aspirin make me feel sick. It will be a bad day all round. My face looks yellow and podgy as cheese.
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 grey hair, and so we learn time passes, all moves. But the descriptions, the observations, the feelings caught and let slip, are fine, a luminous web catching it all in, this is life, this is time.
I now am in pain, and a grinding frustrated pain. Earlier in the morning, the sun, coming over the buildings in the east caught and illuminated to a bright virid glow the ivy, the new ivy, on the red brick wall of the garden below in Acorn Street. The leaves in Louisberg Square are so thick now I can only see the greek togaed statue as a nobbed pale grey stone, with dapples of light and shadow. Dare I take another pill? If the pain would shut up; but then I’d be sicker.
Brains for supper last night. Ugh, I gag to think of it. I made them with a pungent wine sauce and they were ghastly. Even Ted couldn’t eat all of them. Soft, flabby, obscene meat: food for mental invalids. Gah.
ANother fresh May morning gone to hell, for no reason but this crampiness. If childbirth pangs are real, why aren’t cramps real? And why should I have them if I think they’re ridiculous?
The chicken, raw, wrapped in paper in the icebox, dropped a drop of blood on my pristine white cheesecake. Dreamed of catching a very tiny white rabbit last night: a menstruating dream?
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” (I seem jam full of Eliot titles, having changed the title on my book of poems to “The Devil Of The Stairs”). 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 Mlle’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 should be a Best American Short Story.
Amusingly, and significantly, these two stories at the Atlantic free me from an over-emphasis 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 break through 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 Fasset’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.
The Discontented Mayor: A vignette in Spain, American boy and girl living together, interview with mayor. No more than ten pages, full of color and character. Broken mayor. (to Harper’s, Esquire).
Lord Baden-Powell and the Mad Dogs: (New Yorker, Esquire): 7–10 pages, cocktail party setting in weird room at Elizabeth’s with Jim, builds up fake story, his crippling, his way of getting back at the world. Mostly conversation. Sense of fakeness, who is gullible, who is deceived. His way of limiting the healthy members of the world, getting back at them.
Emmet Hummel and the Hoi Polloi: an essay about the annoying experiences with common tradespeople, sense of persecution, contrast to the cheery Reader’s Digest. Example, perhaps concluding example: eating boiled eggs at breakfast in boarding house, cracks off the top, sounds hollow: nothing in egg: puts in salt, pepper, butter. Everyone else is eating eggs. He cannot jump up and shout: Fraud, fraud, I have no egg. Simply puts the spoon to his mouth, makes motions of eating. No one notices him. Other incidents: Subway newstand lady and Magazine. He thumbs through, waiting for train. Wants to see who has written an article. She asks, May I help you in a prodding way. He says, just a minute, I want to see if something is in here. She attends to others. He holds up magazine & five dollar bill, but she deliberately avoids him. Then train comes clanging in. He puts magazine down, thinking it will take too long for her to change the bill, but magically she is there, taking the bill. The train opens its doors and people crowd up to the woman: she takes dimes, changes quarters. Excuse me, excuse me, my change please. She looks satisfied, keeps on taking money. Finally, after everybody almost has got on the train, she counts out four dollar bills and change onto the papers so he has to scramble to pick them up. Rushes away after she says “You kept me waiting so long sir, choosing your magazine, and you expect me to hurry with your change.” Furious. Thinks up devastating answers all the way home on the train. But knows the futility of this: he won’t be back to that same station, and if he ever is, the lady won’t be the same.
Similar encounter in public market with peaches: inability to buy the ones he wants. Sense of his own sensitivity always losing out against the coarse, cheating practicality of the common people. Clerk in a bank, or some such. Neat adding up of figures, no problems. Immaculate, spartan, chaste.
Diggers of house across the street. Babies in boarding house cry. Emmet asks when they’ll be through: “What’s it to you, buddy.” Policeman rude also. Goes through green light, turns yellow. Called over. Policeman makes out ticket in spite of his protests. I guess I better begin on Emmet Hummel. A New Yorker piece? If only I were one of their people.
Supper at Frances Minturn Howard’s25 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 flower-pot holders. A brick flowerbed 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. Dutchmen’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.
Talk: Tom? Is it, Howard, a radio Ham, stories of men in Louisburg Square with ham radios, presidents of companies, heads of the Sheraton Hotels. People who want islands so they will be sought out from all over the world. Calling CQ CQ, calling CQ. Memories of George Sassoon in Cambridge and his set, his radio ham’s pallor. The Horseless Age: magazine of 1904 with all the old cars. Tom’s father knew Wright brothers, man who invented the Stanley Steamer, men who utilized ammonia deposits in refrigerators in a creative way. We talked of Lindbergh, the chaste hero of two continents, the case of the kidnapping of his child. The electrocuted murderess of her husband in some Schneider-Grey case or other, a very clumsy affair. Teletype machines. Steve’s hand-elevator when he had rheumatic fever. The man who slept in the zoo with the monkeys (no, that was another time at Agatha’s, I should have put that down while I remembered it). Pink brocade draperies. Oriental cups, oriental screens. Must learn names of the proper carpets and so on.
Now for Ingalls: his mother determined to redecorate the house, making the South Side into a separate house for Ingalls & his wife. Says to Doctor: “Well I don’t suppose if I have only a year or so to live it would be much use to decorate. What do you advise me to do?” Doctor Jarman reported to have said “Don’t redecorate.” Cruelly confirming her suspicions. Now she wants to redecorate the livingroom to make it more livable for herself. Problem of her Idees Fixe after last bout of pneumonia: her wheelchair, being wheeled around in the Circle by a handiman.
The Night Watchman with Problems: feet hurt, has to sit down, always falls asleep when he sits down. Falls in love with all the Hotel’s telephone operators, sends them presents.
Mr. Munyer: Fine laces, leathers, etc. etc. Complaining letter: rent of shop raising now three times, to $7000. Not as many display windows as shoe shop, and no fans now. Atmospheric condition so serious that customers just step in and step out again it is so intolerably humid, with-out looking around. Airconditioning said to cost close to two-thousand dollars. He doesn’t want to pay, for it will only go into increasing value of shop for hotel, nothing he can take away with him, and nobody will rent the shop if it’s not air-conditioned. His twenty-five year build-up of customers, his yearly trip for fine leathers and laces to Vienna. Aggrieved, aggrieved. His “Levantine indirection”.
Taffee: Ingalls daughter in Germany. Applications to Radcliffe for year after next. What will she do this year? Be a Gaststudent in Germany? Ingalls 15 year old boy at Nobel and Greenough: his car Puddle-Jumper.
The ski lodge: expensive lanterns. 6 hundred $ sofas, chairs, counters, carpets, draperies. Cork floors. Fireplaces. Snow-making machine. Trestle lift. Change of advertising agents. Genteel bungling of old agents: “gentle ladies to babysit”: he changes all this.
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 fairytales, bad translations of the great poets.
Jane & Peter: Sense of something wrong. She redoing whole house where Peter’s mistress lived for two years. They are repainting, buying original paintings – – – - a Lawrence Sisson of worm-diggers. Very funny, now that I think of it. His tragic burnt-out fire poem in the Atlantic (also odd, with Ted’s poem supposedly accepted last fall when Peter’s were rejected not out yet) which Jane snorts at: “When did you write it?” Does she know all about his mistress. Or, for that matter, about me? God, story-situation after situation. Only to make them, to define them.
I feel in a braiding-rug mood today. Very sleepy, as after a good love-making, 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.
Rain last night drawing away visibly, street by street: it is raining everywhere, pouring great whited lines, then not raining on Willow Street, but raining on Chesnut Street and the park, then not raining on Chestnut Street, but raining on the park, then the rain and clouds folding up completely and packing off. A grey, silvered sunset, everything faintly luminous and glistening, but the heat unrelieved. Baby ducklings bobbing comically on the Embankment. We kept counting six, six, everytime we got a number a couple going down and couple more bobbing up. Suddenly there were eight, and they all paddled away to the breakwater islands to go to bed.
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.
June 6
Saturday
After a spurt of unaccustomed exercise yesterday in Gloucester Harbor, rowing in the cold, without enough layers of sweaters to keep from shaking with chill, and catching not one fish, although a boat of two male rowers passed by holding up a string of mammoth white-bellied flounders and a pan of the same, I fell aching into bed last night and slept as if blackjacked.
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 back-yard tale, with the would-be Salinger child in it. Beuscher 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 RB has become my mother. Felt radiant, a New Yorker glow lighting my face. Precisely analogous 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,26 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.
I am grim, sour. Rejection will follow rejection. I am only a little better equipped to take them than a year, two years ago. I am still at the low point of consoling myself by the assurance that Dudley Fitts is a fool, who wouldn’t know a syllabic verse if he saw one. Well, now to the rounds. To Knopf, Viking, Harcourt, Brace.
Wednesday
June 10
Three poetry rejections this morning: Paris Review, New Yorker, and Christian Science Monitor. Notes, nice notes. The main thing being to send them out rapidly again. Just as I think: ah, I shall have no trouble getting these accepted, bang. Sent my book of poems, The Devil Of The Stairs, off to Knopf on Monday, June 8th. How unpopular I am. Will send a bunch to the Nation. Well, have made Sewanee, Partisan, Hudson this year. And another 2 to the New Yorker. The CSMonitor likes my last essay, the one on Withens. Must get Folks into any others I do. Folks and facts. Send my poems next to Harcourt, Brace. Philip Booth’s history of lots of publisher’s rejections. Then the Lamont prize. Maybe I can play the same game.
Day in Winthrop, fishing. Cold. Caught two crabs (Ted did) and a skate, foul-lipped face on a flat fish. Came home with 15 pounds of fresh cod thanks to a moustached, wooden-footed acquaintance of the sea who went out 16 miles and came back with a boat full which he halved with us. Gulls hanging, voracious, tugging at the fish-guts he tossed, wolfing a foot-long intestine in a few flying gulps. Crying, and hanging on the wind over our heads.
Notes: Woman on the bus with three children and a fourth on the way. Loud shrew voice: Princess, Princess, you can’t stand up there.
A woman who secretly deprives her husband of the best, largest plate of food: eats the marrow out of his bones literally.
People who grow a whole colony of avocado tree-plants along the shelf by the shower in the bathroom.
Must do a couple more stories so I won’t be sad, overly sad, when the one’s I’ve done come back from the New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. How many thousands of people as writers more successful than I. If I don’t write in spite of this, in spite of rejections, I don’t deserve acceptances.
Felt broken on the rack after yesterdays wind, rowing. Good feeling. Everything in life takes tang from it: hot tea, hot bath, freshest ever cod-fish sauteed with hot potatoes. Reading in bed. Warm comforts. Began Lonely Crowd this morning, an antidote to V. Woolf’s tiresome The Years, finished last night. She flits, she throws out her gossamer nets. Rose, at age 9, sneaks to the store in the evening alone. Then she is fat, grey-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 current under the badinage.
What to discuss with RB? Work, desire for work of meaning. To learn German. To write, be a Renaissance woman.
Saturday
June 13
A rainy, sticky unweddingy day. Three years ago, on such a day in London, Ted and I were tracking down our clergyman in front of Charles Dickens house.
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 sure this proves him the Best. Calling up, “O, didn’t I tell you”. I had inured myself to a better book than mine, but this seemed a rank travesty, and John Holmes27 well-involved in it. Asking us out to night spots with him and Galway Kinnell,28 the one dense and utterly unfavorable reviewer Ted had (“not one important or finished poem in the book”) to celebrate Kinnell’s acceptance by Houghton Mifflin and submission to the Lamont Awards. Of course he will win.
Drank tea, ate steak and fried potatoes about 10 pm, the steak, of course, the first mealy-mouth steak we’ve got from DeLuca. Read COSMOPOLITAN from cover to cover. Two mental-health articles. I must write one about a college girl suicide. THE DAY I DIED.
And a story, a novel even. Must get out SNAKE PIT. There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it.
Mailmen below everywhere in the rain, in their short-sleeved light blue shirts and prophetic hats. O for a word, a transfiguring word. I regressed, but am getting back where my Self and my need to publicly affirm its Success Powers is melting out of my view, and the world, with my great curiosity in it, my need to observe, clinically, pain, sorrow, jealousy, conversaion, is coming back and I, that limiting blank wall, am irrevelant.
My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold A Mailman On The Street.
For RB: 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: Inaccessibility 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.
Also, about Ambition: universal, driving Ambition; how to harness it, not be a Phaeton to its galloping horses. To keep in that state of itch which is comfortable: goals far enough ahead to be stimulating, near enough to be attainable with discipline and hard work, and self-generating enough to offer new goals and distances when one is achieved. And to work like a ditch-digger to spade up new areas of sensibility and knowledge and awareness.
A frigid grey morning, cold wet snivelling winds. I am still dazed by our being back on schedule. Yesterday: a very Pleasant day. We got up early. Ted got raisin bread at the store & we drank hot tea with the crisp fruity toast, sogged in butter. Outside: whipping rains, black skies, cracks and bumbles of thunder. I worked all day on his “Courting of Petty Quinnett” story, which I think is marvelous: perfectly plotted, the race of the three women for the fortune and the husband, each with a character pattern that involves, inevitably, her dropping out, in one way or another, of the race. Ted’s mother & sons relation very well done. The fine apparition of Mad Ann Pilling in a red ball dress on the old cart horse. He has a book of stories here: Yorkshire tales. I am very proud and excited. Where to sell it? Some audience would be delighted. I think, if it passes Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, I’ll try the Ladies’ Home Journal even, and Cosmopolitan, then Mlle, then, finally, the New Yorker, the Atlantic. It is an off-beat story, but I should think eminently publishable.
I rise and sit again. No mailman of course. Have finished the Frankau novel, also excellent: Cara and the Duchess magnificent eccentricas come to colored, mad life. Fine foil to the sensitive drolly grave Penelope Wells and the serious Don. Read Jean Stafford, so much more human than Elizabeth Hardwicke. Hardwicke’s characters utterly unlikeable in any way. A sense of the superior position of writer and reader – – – - even the baby, as Agatha 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. What strikes me about that collection of four New Yorker writers is their density. I tried to approach this, and, I think, did, in my “Sweetie Pie” story, and, in another way, in my hospital story, but my “Shadow” story reads mighty thin, mighty pale.
Today: reminisences of Cantors outdoor wedding. The great tent in the garden with leaf silhouettes on the roof, freshly planted mignonette, baby’s-breath. Daisy bunches on little ribboned posts, a red-carpet, green-and-white-striped canopy from the street. Guests: men with canes, ladies in white straw hats, white gloves, pastel linens. Mrs. C’s electric blue roses, electric blue shoes, electric blue hat of a great cabbge rose sitting smack on top of her head with a sequinned veil frilled out around it like a corolla of fishnet, the vivid turquoise feathers repeating the motif of turquoise on the print dress. Her tall elegance: “Kahalil Gibran, by the Prophet”. The Christian Science Service: by a renegade Unitarian minister: service made up by the young people. Readings from Gibran, Science and Health, something about the masculine and feminine principles. Dangerous and ambiguous reading from Gibran about needing to stay separate, Laurentian. Leave out “in sickness and in health”. Musicians: organ, violin, bass fiddle, hidden in shrubbery with soprano. Aria “Overhead the Moon is Beaming” from Student Prince. “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”, “Wonderful Guy”, “The Girl That I Marry” at reception. Line. Yellow sunflower dresses, straw hats, green velvet ribbons and green shoes. Undoctored punch, tables miraculously up in yard: spun sugar, shoe and rose shaped ices, mushrooms, caviar, lobster puffs, asparagus rolls.
Notes: “Do you remember my dream?” A giddy woman who has mildly prophetic dreams. Lives in dreams. THE BIG DREAMER. Just looked up my old story, THE WISHING BOX: not bad. One or two places quite amusing. But the real world in it isn’t real enough. It is too much a fable. Good idea, though.
MENTAL HOSPITAL STORIES: Lazarus theme. Come back from the dead. Kicking off thermometers. Violent ward. LAZARUS MY LOVE.
I think I see Our Mailman, the one with the redolent cigars. Resign, resign, myself to rejection from the New Yorker, even though I dreamed I saw my obstetrician story published under the title of my hospital story at the Atlantic.
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.29 After the grim news Starbuck got the Yale, to which I am now resigned, if disappointed in Fitts’ judgment, and that Maxine K 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 Rosenthal would write me about Macmillan. But my book, grim as it is, needs a prize to sell it.
NOW: the story about George, J—and Ann, 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 Ann, feels very clever. Then finds out, when A’s book is accepted, it is really A, gets furious. Calls up society, or gets sociologist friend to call up society for prevention of cruelty for 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.
THE SILVER PIE SERVER: Mrs. Guinea and Sadie Peregrine: war of two old shuttledoors and battlecocks. Loneliness and meanness of two. Odd friendship. Frogs: cold, slimy pets. Thoughts, emotions of Mrs. Guinea. Gloomy, lugubrious. Rug-changing incident. Vengeance on young happy couple upstairs, always arguing, crying, but apparently happy. Broken leg. They search for pie-server, but do not find it. Symbol of propriety of gloom, Mrs. Doom.
PS: Nothing in mail but circulars from the Poetry Society, and a little card, which I like, from AKnopf, the usual about receiving the ms., every care taken except in fire, flood. With a Borzoi dog. Only pray I hear from them before the damn H. Holt.
Ann Peregrine was as methodical about committing suicide as she was about cleaning house.
June 16
Tuesday
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 Pieserver story. Suddenly she became the heroine of my Novel Falcon Yard. Oh, the irony. Oh, the character. In the first place: SP, 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.
Read over stories written in Spain yesterday. Very depressed. They are so DULL. Who’d want to read them. The circumstances, Widow Mangada, the Prado, the Black Bull, the Stick Man, live in my mind highly colored. But the telling is so boring. I almost wept. What if these four stories I have just finished are as boring to editors as my 3 1956 stories to the 1959 me?
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.
I bob up for the mailman. Surely, symbolically, today a book acceptance will come. More likely a story rejection from the New Yorker. Why did I dream my obstetrician story would get in? One of those gruesome dreams-in-reverse of the fact, no doubt, like my dreaming of getting money before the Saxton rejections.
Arts Festival: Gagaku Japanese Dancers. Weird, odd, but I went into a trance. The high pipey, drumskin music, jars of water, blown reeds. The raised royal stage. Red cinnabar, gold. And the stepping and bowing, the delicate stylized patterns of four and two. Orange sleeves, planes of embroidered color. Headdresses of gold and silver. The animal-faced prince. The lovely dance before the cave of the sun-goddess, with a bough of green to which was attached a white circlet, shaping the air, now against the green, now hanging from it, a supplication. Then the sabers, the spears. A cold, wet night, the soil squishy underfoot, people with woolen rugs, hats, scarves, layers of sweaters. A few drops of chill rain. Low dark skies. Winds of merciless damp.
Remember: do not feel shut out of your past. Especially the summer of the Mayos. Remember every detail of that: a story is in that. And in Ilo and the farm summer. My god. God, I think I’ll Start on that. Mary Coffee. The damn thing is, I have the goddam subjects, but am thumbs and loose ends trying to realize them, order them. Tell it in third person, for god’s sake.
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 testtube. “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. J—– is crazy, raped, but she has children. C—– is unmarried, sick, but she has a child. And I, come to the time, the great good time of love whereof children are the crown and glory, sit here, chewing my nails. I simply don’t know what to do. All joy and hope is gone.
WEDNESDAY: SEPTEMBER 16:30
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 above 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 under-currents gone into or developed. As if little hygenic 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 footsoles 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.
Try a first-person story and forget John Updike and Nadine Gordimer. Forget the results, the markets. Love only what you do, and make. Learn German. Don’t let indolence, the forerunner of death, take over. Enough has happened, enough people entered your life, to make stories, many stories, even a book. So let them onto the page and let them work out their destinies.
In the morning light, all is possible; even becoming a god.
Yaddo: Library:31 Second Floor
Dark paneled wainscots up to door-lintels. White plaster strip above that. Dark wood molding. White plaster ceiling, no ceiling fixtures. Three squarish persian carpets on the floor – busy with blues, reds, greens on dark blue or pale yellow ground. Dark red stair carpet. Magazine table (Sewanee, Kenyon, Art News, Musical Quarterly, Paris Review etc) covered with red, mauve, navy & buff patterned carpet over the dark oval table with ringed wood legs. Table flanked by two heavy arm chairs, open work wood sides, red plush back & seat cushion tacked to wood. Bust of Homere on dark mottled green marble pillar in corner. Ornate gilt wall lamp fixture with petals of streaked pink & white glass for the bowl of it – exotic magnolia petals. All scrolls & filigree leaves.
Square marble-topped end table with carved open work ebony wood, shelf for a gilt-lettered Websters. A piece of pink-veined petrified rock. Pane of stained glass on either side of sliding doors opening onto porch – gold & green medallion with gold torches & border – watered-semiopaque glass background. Dim oil portrait of Katrina with bare spiritual white bosom & shoulders in dim frame – oval portrait above windowless window seat. Old-gold velvet mat & pillows. Round table, more periodicals, flanked by armchairs, straightbacked & covered in yellow brocade – two more of these chairs down the room by another carved round table supporting a fat yellow & white figured contemporary lamp; its white silk shade encased in cellophane. A great gilt-framed painting of a dark-shadowed headland against a deep blue cloud-crossed sky above a heavy, long table with columnar legs, covered by a blue & white patterned rug. On it, Nation, New Republic, miniature of the winged victory. Giant pitcher with dolphin mouth, gilt figurehead angel under it, over worked with white dragons, cherubs & winged monsters on a dark blue ground – Wainscotted Stair coming down from above. On the newel, another elaborate lamp in form of a grecian vase with bas relief of naked nymphs – two nymps with goat-hooves holding respectively a goblet & a grape cluster toward lamp bowl of frilled pink candy-glass. On stair-landing: large stained glass window of woman in blue gown, float in white draperies & fillet of pearls binding auburn hair holding hands to a sky of stone-shaped clouds – green lawn, blue & white sky. Carpet glows blood red. Trickle of fountain below stairs. Glassed-in reading porch with three great-arched windows looking into thick green pinetrees – slatted wooden summer chairs. Saccharine gilded statue in greek robes & laurel bearing sign Amor & Caritas. Dark hall to bedrooms. Window of little bull’s eyes, leaded. Ornate sideboard – enclosing Bayreuth beersteins – gilded bow-legs, gilded wood set with innumerable round, oval & leaf-shaped mirrors
[drawing of sideboard – ed.]
Glass atlas of stars & constellations painted with birds, men horses in yellow & blue & green – equinoxes marked in red on wrought iron pedestal –
Centaurus, Lupus Scorpio, Cancer, Taurus Capricornus, Sagittarius Pegasus, Andromeda, Lynx, Leo.
Veduta dell’esterno della gran basilica de S. pietro in vaticano (Piranesi Architetto fec.)
Veduta del Sepolcro di Cajo Cestio
Veduta del Castello dell’Acqua Paola sul Montre Aureo
Veduta della vasta Fontana di trevi . . anticamente detta Vacqua Vergine
[drawing of candlestick – ed.]
White walls, dark wood-framed engravings – ruddy orange carpet – yellow chairs. Fat bellied cherubs carved on desk – tall candlesticks with holder like ladies leg o’mutton sleeve – glossy green stones set in fine vents –
Alcove – wall-statue of angel over large cherubs – head – gilded wood “priere” – hands of angel steepled in prayer
Engraving of masts & italianate ships – “Veduta del Porto di Ripa Grande” Old photos of children in openwork quadruple wood screen – carved wood flowers & leaves
[drawing of screen – ed.]
Engraving – veduta del campidoglio di fianko
Silver vase – tiffany – on image of Greek vas with classical figures, horses, shields, chariot
[drawing of vase – ed.]
Chair inlaid with panels of light wood, diamonds & flowers & leaf-sprigs in white & red on black –
[drawing of chair – ed.]
