Transcript:

23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.l
February 4, 1963

Dear Dr. Beuscher,

I write from London where I have found a flat & an au pair and can see ahead financially for about a year. I thought I’d get an unfurnished flat~ furnish it by poems & loans, & rent it out summers to tourists while I went back to Devon, to earn most of the rent for it & Ted says he’ll try to pay us about $280 a month while’ I try to make up the rest by writing. I have finally read the Fromm & think that I have been guilty of what he calls ‘idolatrous love’, that I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself, and this was why deeply underneath the marvelous loving, the writing, the babies I feared his loss, his leaving me & depended on him more & more, making him both idol & father. There was enough identity left to me in Devon to make me feel immense relief at his departure & at the prospect of divorce—now I shall grow out of his shadow, I thought, I shall be me. While we were married we were never apart & all experience filtered through each other. On a grownup level, I don’t think I could have endured a marriage of infidelities. l had a beautiful, virile, brilliant man & he still is, whatever immaturities there may be in his throwing over everything in such a violent way. He has said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on on our own.

What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst—cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies. Perhaps this is accentuated by my seeing Ted once a week when he comes to see Frieda—seeing how happy & whole & independent he is now, how much more I admire him like this, & what good friends we could be if I could manage to grow up too. He is gaga over this ad-agency girl who has gone back to live with her 3rd husband to keep the passion hot, although she did live for 3 weeks with Ted & flew to Spain for a holiday with him. If I were simply jealous about this it would be okay. But I know Spain and lovemaking would do me no good now, not until I find myself again. I feel I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death & found Fromm’s recommendation for concentration, patience & faith gave me a kind of peace, but that I keep slapping into this pit of panic & deepfreeze, with my mother’s horrible example of fearful anxiety & “unselfishness” on one side & the beauties of my two little children on the other. I am living on sleeping pills & nerve tonic & have managed a few commissions for a magazine & the BBC and poems very good but, I feel written on the edge of madness. The publicity of Ted’s leaving is universal & I was taking it all with dignity & verve at first—people were buying poems & putting BBC work in my way, & I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud & give up. A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & the despair at being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on me like a cold, accusing wind. Just now it is torture to me to dress, plan meal~, put one foot in front of the other. Ironically my novel about my first breakdown is getting rave reviews over here. I feel a simple act of will would make the world steady & solidify. No-one can save me but myself, but I need help & my doctor is referring me to a woman psychiatrist. Living on my wits, my writing—even partially, is very hard at this time, it is so subjective & dependent on objectivity. I am, for the first time since my marriage, relating to people without Ted, but my own lack of center, of mature identity, is a great torment. I am aware of a cowardice. in myself, a wanting to give up. If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own Ted’s leaving would be hard, but manageable. But there is this damned, self-induced freeze. I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it. How can I get out of this ghastly defeatist cycle & grow up. I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me at this time, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself.

Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea.

With love,
Sylvia