Transcript:

Court Green

North Tawton

Devonhire, England

Monday: July 30^th

 

Dear Dr. Beuscher,

I do hope you will agree to a few paid letter-sessions. I have even been wildly thinking of saving my money to fly to America for some person-to-person sessions with you, if that were possible, but I have to do a few more novels to manage that, I think. This seems a violent change-point in my life, & I feel to need to work toward as much insight as possible to change with it & weather it in a creative way, not withdraw from it. I feel I could ruin everything now by persisting in blindness & ignorance.

I have been at a nadir, very grim, since my last letter to you . What I would like to do is isolate and purge the father-feelings from my relation with Ted. I see I’ve been a fool to indulge in these—I’ve been frantic if Ted came home later than he said, for fear he might be in an accident; I’ve not wanted to stay alone overnight in the country, because the darks of Dartmoor scared me; I’ve let him buy the meat (my father always brought home our groceries from work) & had Frieda play with him mornings while he worked in the garden & I wrote. We had reasoned that this last arrangement was “economical”— freed me for writing at my peak period to earn money & Ted had to do the chores around the place anyhow, so why not let Frieda play along. He’s always loved her & loved teaching her things. Well  I see my fear of accident & dark as repetitions of fears for the life of my father: they are gone from me. I shall do all the shopping & baby-minding (I am now just about successful enough to hire a local babyminder for 4 hours a morning) as these have turned from casual jobs into symbols of whose sex is what. What other practical things can I do?

And what, above all, does Ted think I am? His mother? A womb? What can I do to stop him seeing me as a puritannical warden? He says he doesn’t want any more children & wants to make over our cottage & hire a live-in nanny to free me (fine by me!); when Nicholas came, he said he felt the baby was a usurper. I don’t think he’d have felt this if it had been a girl — so does that make Ted my baby as well as me his? Ye Gods. I would like a couple more children—later, when I have this live-in nanny so I can take off.

Anyhow, Ted is on the rampage—writing letters and even radio broadcasts about the advantages of destruction, breaking one’s life into bits every ten years, and damn the pieces. His favorite poem of his own is pure ego-Fascist, about a hawk “I kill where I please because it is all mine.” I realise now he considered I might kill myself over this ( as did the wife of someone we know well) , and what he did was worth it to him. I have always admired him for this inner pride and energy—most people just haven’t got the power in them. But I would like to break my life, & go ahead with him, not be relegated to the homefront: the suffering & pitied but very repugnant mother-wife.

The real crux to me now is what to do about the Other Woman business. Maybe a lot of my nausea & shortness of breath & sleeplessness is due to my second loss of a second father. Okay. I want to get rid of those little-girl desires & fears. But some of it is that I am horribly hurt in my morale as a wife. Ted had one girl after another till he met me. AND I had enough inner pride in myself as a woman not to fear other attractive woman—I liked them as friends myself. Now Ted is looking everybody over. And with him, it’s not flirting, it’s bed. We went for a ghastly poetry reading together to Wales this week. I had just weaned the baby in a hurry, my milk was going anyway, & I didn’t want to take the baby along. Well there was a very lovely 18 year old blonde secretary, just married. Ted eyed her, immediately made a date to read in her hometown and asked me what I thought of her, why didn’t she quite come off? Well he always criticizes a woman he’s after . To put me off. What am I to do? Ted says he hadn’t been infatuated with anybody for 6 years since me, till this ad-agency girl. Am I to cheer him off onto one infatuation after another now? I have too much pride to say: O please God, it kills me to think of all these other women knowing you and your body and laughing at me, doing the dishes & wiping noses in Devon. My other impulse is to say: O fuck off, grab them all. What seems civilised & sophisticated to the people we move among seems stupid and boring and selfish to me. Am I an idiot to think that there is some purpose in being bodily faithful to the person you love? In riding through infatuations without always indulging yourself, if you know it hurt someone? I mean, my pleasure in lovemaking is spoiled by thinking: is he comparing my hair to this one, my shape to that one, my talents to the other?

I am sick of being suspicious. I would rather know the truth about everything, than merely suspect it. And be told by all the other people who love to pass on nasty news—and when you’re famous as Ted is over here, they are legion. How can I have any self-respect? I hate the idea of living here in the country with the children & having Ted go off sleep with various women & comeback exhausted & refreshed to write, be fed etc. It humiliates me. I simply can’t laugh and blow smoke-rings. He hates me to be tearful, but my god, the prospect of this makes me cry. I don’t ask for “conventional” safety, but how can I make our relationship “fundamentally safe”, as you suggest it can be? When I think he wants to follow every infatuation into bed, shall I just let him? This is what freedom, it seems, means to him. And just about all. He is  handsome & fantastically virile & attractive. I am not beautiful. When I am happy, I can glow & burn, but what have I in this to make me happy? I bear his name; I have born his children. He loves me in a way. Shall I just sit around waiting till some girl agitates him to get a divorce? I mean, I want to write, travel, etc. etc., but it is pretty hollow to me when my relation to my husband is such a lousy one. How can I have the guts to cheer him on to new women, wait & wait, wondering how long it will last, and then welcome him home, no tears, no bitchery, no nothing. How can I make these women unnecessary to him? And keep up my own sense of seductiveness and womanly power? I don’t want to be sorrowful or bitter, men hate that, but what can I do in face of these prospects?

What I need now is the guts not to be lugubrious or accusing when I am tired, or my morale is low. I want Ted to understand I am not a doll-wife who can be lied to & kept happy. I want the dignity of facing facts, & facing them before all my friends & relatives. There are a few things I do think important. I’m not French enough to enjoy entertaining people who sleep with my husband, & having the little bitches criticize my hostessery into the bargain. I ‘d like honestly to know roughly where Ted is, so I could get in touch with him at a GPO or something in case of emergency. If he is fucking about with someone, I’d rather know it straight out, than get suspicions, intimations, anonymous phonecalls & letters. Do you think I am still asking too much? I mean, I do think I am prepared to do an awful lot. I am a good cook, I mow the lawn, am getting to be a good gardener, I weed, afford a cleaner, earn half our income (this I feel is an advantage to both of us, for it frees Ted from a dull job to support us, & gives us travel money), make out the income tax, am a feeling & imaginative lay, & probably can write quite funny & good books.

What I see now I could not have stood, what would to me have been the real worst, was for Ted to come & say: I want this girl for my wife & to bear my children. But of course he felt his problem was womb-engulfment & did not want a wife or children at all. I at one point told him: I am saving you from ever getting mucked up with a wife & children again: you can have tarts & bastards, but if any other women gets refrigerators & nappies in her eyes, you can say you have a really good old wife at home who is saving you to be free & not get stuck in the wallow of domesticity again. And he does genuinely love us. He says now he dimly thought this would either kill me or make me, and I think it might make me. And him too.

What I also need is wisdom for him. He takes a lot of understanding. He is, I am sure, a genius. A really great writer, a handsome and great man. I have been so hurt this week I feel like upchucking at the thought of his laying about with other women just this minute . But I would like to be able to cope with this again, if it came up. If he needed to test his freedom, to test me. And believe me, women are dying to get their hands on him. And ^[on] me, too. I honestly don’t ever, by cowardice, boringness, accusation, limitedness, ever want to give Ted the chance to think he should trade us in for a better family model. I am sure there will be other pressure points, as he proves & proves his freedom to himself, & ^[I] would like to feel I could write to you for a talk at those times, & be billed, as for interviews.

What I am not is a Penelope type. I have come to this country town because Ted said it was his dream—apples, fishing, peace, clean air, etc. etc. I had wanted to stay in London, because I liked all the social life, movies, art exhibits & rush. Well now I love it here, & this is the first home I’ve had, very beautiful, & with some fine people in the neighborhood. It is a good base. But I am damned if I want to sit here like a cow, milked by babies. I love my children, but want my own life. I want to write books, see people & travel. I want, eventually, to make over our separate cottage & hire a nanny. So I’ve got to work hard. I refuse the role of passive, suffering wife. I think your advice about not having any more children for years a good one. I think I’d like a couple more someday, but only when I’ve got a nanny to free me.

I am, by the way, not fat!! I have the gift God gives some skinny women, namely that having babies & nursing them have given me a better figure than I ever hoped for, & my waist is the same (with all this lugging of fertiliser pots, mowing lawns & weeding huge vegetable patches) & I can wear clothes with good style. My nose, I fear, is unalterable, but otherwise I might become vain & insufferable, so the good lord has seen fit, in his wisdom, to load me with it. My hair (I remember you once said: Either very short or very long, no shillyshally pageboys) is very long. I sometimes walk about in it like a shawl, & have a good enough coronet effect which few women can attain, with braids in a kind of pillbox.

I would like some time to have you discuss what you suggest about ^[being in] my own womb & having babies & my “prehistoric cave”. I get a terrifijc sensual pleasure in being pregnant & nursing. But I must say, I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being light & slender & fucking as well.

Can you think of any other discontents of Ted’s I might forsee? I think he will need to prove conclusively & perhaps several times, ^[(soon)] then maybe less often, that he is “free”. He says this means travel, not tarts, but I feel naturally now the two go together. What I don’t want to be is an unfucked wife. I get bitter then, & cross. And I feel wasted. And I don’t just mean the token American what-is-it twice a week, front to front, ^[“]thank you darling^[“] either. It might simplify things if I could desire other men, but I need to admire them too, & find them attractive, & there are very few of these, & I’m not likely to meet them in cow country.

Practically, Ted needs a job of some sort that takes him away quite regularly. I think this might be managed with sealing engagements: he gets enough requests, & could thus travel throughout England, spacing them one or two a week. But I honestly don’t feel like sticking through the bloody country winter with no husband to come home & share experiences for weeks on indefinite weeks. I like to go on long holidays too.

Can you suggest a gracious procedure when you see some little (whoops, not little, big!) tart is after your husband at a party, or dinner or something? Do you leave them to it? Engage a hotel room? Smile & vanish? Smile & stand by? What I don’t want to be is stern & disapproving or teary. But I am only human. I have to feel I have some ground-rights. So far, I have only said I don’t want the bitches to sit around the house expecting me to cook them nice dinners. But I don’t find joy in the general sexual exchanges one finds in our world. I mean, Ted is unique to me. I would like to be unique to him. And wise. Yes, wiser than he is in some ways. By the time I am 50 I want to be very experienced & have purple hair & be very wise & have interesting children & piles of money.

Can you weed through this & tell me where you think I am fooling myself, near truth, downright stupid. What can I legitimately ask of Ted? And he of me? A funny footnote: all through this Ted’s been writing a radio play fittingly called “Difficulties of a Bridegroom”. It was accepted on the condition that he re-write the reality frame of the bridegroom’s encounter with a dream femme fatale so the audience would know what was real & what wasnt. A nice parable illustrating your point about the reality of this woman.

Thanks a million times for the letter. Do answer this. & bill me for the lot.

Love, Sylvia Hughes

 

[Handwritten marginalia: P.S. All day I have been planting out my seedlings from their greenhouse “growing pots” into open ground. “Hardening them off” is the horticultural expression.]