October 21st, 1962

Transcript:

Court Green

North Tawton

Devonshire, England

October 21, 1962

 

Dear Dr. Beuscher,

Since I last wrote you , everything has blown up, blown apart, and settled in new and startling places. I wrote you in a state of crisis—when Ted ‘ s poems told me what he hadn’t the guts to tell me and had lied blue to keep me from knowing, that he was madly in love with another woman & will probably become her 4th husband. What has astounded me is my reaction to his departure—for good, last week, and to my decision to get a divorce as fast as I can. I felt the most fantastic exhilaration & relief. I understand now what you meant about being in my own womb, my own primal cave. I was so far gone in I was cow-dumb. In the last 3 years I have produced & nursed for 10 & 6 months respectively, two children, had a miscarriage, and been so intrigued & delighted by my bodily processes & infants I have been out for the count. Also, my relation to Ted was in many, many ways, gravely regressed, more & more I was calling on him to be a father & hating myself for it. After I drove him to the station with his things, I returned to the empty house expecting to be morbid and huge with gloom. I was ecstatic. My life, my sense of identity, seemed to be flying back to me from all quarters, buried hidden places. I knew what I wanted to do, pretty much who I was, where I wanted to go, who I wanted to seek, even just how, when I get to a good London haircutter, I wanted to do my weird hair. I was my own woman.

My sex confidence suffered a hard blow—it is not easy to face a gossipy professional world in which my husband’s best friends are my employers and know they all know I have been deserted and for whom and under what conditions. But I go up to record a long poem for the BBC next week & will start announcing the divorce. I am happy about it, very very happy & this will come through. I have enough energy to manage fallout, escaped Dartmoor convicts, etc. for a lifetime . All during my 6 years of marriage I wondered what to write about, my poems seemed to me like fantastical stuffed birds under bell jars. Now I get up at 4 a.m. every morning when my sleeping pill wears off & write like fury till 8, stuffing the babes with rusks & juice. I am doing a poem a day, all marvelous, free, full songs. Every thing I read about, hear, see , experience or have experienced is on tap, like a wonderful drink. I can use everything. I think my marriage, though it had much good , was a pretty sick one.

Ted has reverted to pretty much what he was when I met him— “the greatest seducer in Cambridge”, only now it is “the world” , he wants to be an “international catalyst”. Even in love with this barren ad agency writer who commands a huge salary & puts it all on her back, he picks up Finns in coffee bars & takes them to hotels — he & this Assia are such a perfect match I laugh in my guts when I think of them married. They look exactly alike: the same color, shape, everything. She is his twin sister , & like his sister, barren, uncreative, a real vamp. All sophistication. They smoke (Ted, a nonsmoker, has been desperately practising) & drop names of the opposite sex, to titillate each other. They will be elaborately unfaithful to each other, very rich, & have no children, I presume, if her 2 abortions & 4 miscarriages can let me have this satisfaction.

I suppose it will be hell for me to meet them together at my first party or literary affair. But I will. Oddly, I think some day she & I may be friends, not friends, but speaking. Ted says she has got my book out of the library, adores my work, etc. etc., & although both of them behaved like bitch & bastard in this, she at least had the guts to tell her husband at the end how serious things were. Ted had planned to simply desert me, without address, without money & without explanation. His stay here before the final departure almost killed me. I have never felt such hate. He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money & Frieda, told me I was brainless , hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love he had never told me, and even two years ago he had not wanted to live with me. I was aghast at this last—why then , stick me in Devon (his “dream”) in a huge house with grounds needing a full-time gardener, away from all culture, movies, plays, art shows, museums , libraries, brainy & smart people, with two babies, then desert and cut off the money! Why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged! It will be at least a year before I can muster a flat in London—I love living there, all the good free schools & the best doctors are there, and the people, the events I want. He told me in London it death to him, got me down here hand-hemming curtains & painting furniture for a year hoping to see him radiant with what he wanted, & he seemed to be, then pouf! Two years of hypocrisy, just waiting for the right bed to fall in? I can’t believe it. It just seems insane to me.

Ted is on the brink of real wealth. His mss. sell for $100 a poem, just the handwriting. He is at the peak of fame. I was scrimping 6 years for this, balancing check books, dying for first nights, trips, dresses & a nanny. His family wants him to give us nothing. He has left me no address, I have no word, & no sign he means to live up to his pledge of £1,000 a year. I hope time may mellow him toward the children, but I doubt it . His ethic is that of the hawk in one of his most famous poems being taught to all British schoolchildren: I kill where I please, it is all mine. He was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!

Just tell me where all this hate comes from? He says he thinks I am “dangerous” toward him now. Well, I should think so!

I see, too, that domesticity was a fake cloak for me. My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well. I can give a floor a beautiful scrub, cook a fine pie, deliver a baby with ease, and stitch up a nightgown. I also love hanging out a clean laundry in the apple orchard. But I hate doing housework all, or much of the time. I have been running a 103 fever out of sheer mad excitement with my own writing. I am ravenous for study, experience, travel. I love learning how to manage things—I have kept bees this year, my own hive, & am very proud of my bottled honey, & my stings. I am learning to ride horseback & the riding mistress is delighted, I am a natural. My mind is dying of starvation here. And I am tied by nothing but money. And the sense my husband wants to kill me by cutting it off altogether, so I am hogtied & can’t work. It’s enough to make any woman sail to Lesbos!

What I don’t want is a nice, safe, dull, sweet reliable husband to take Ted ‘ s place. He has to marry again—who’ll cook? And what a showpiece for looks he’s got! But me. My independence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to anyone again. Most men who are domestic are dull—I hate routine jobs, and most men who are creative or scientific miracles are bastards. I don’t mind knowing a bastard, or having an affair with a bastard, I just don’t want to be married to a bastard. I suppose it sounds as if I think all men are bastards, I don’t, but the interesting ones I would rather have as either friends, lovers or both, than husbands. Faithfulness, the ethic of faithfulness, is essentially boring. I see that. Ted made much better love while he was having these other affairs, & the tart in me appreciated this. But I also just haven’t the time to be married to a philanderer. That bores me too. There is so much else besides sex. I want my career, my children, and a free supple life. I hate this growing-pot as much as Ted did.

I guess I haven’t really been “cured”. I seem to have acted, in a different key, my mother’s relation with my father—and my joy in “getting rid” of Ted is a dangerous one. I don’t think I could bear living forever with one man, or even for long with one. I like being alone too much, being my own boss. I am not attracted to women physically, although I do admire beauty—I say that is the novelist in me, & maybe it is. By brains and variety & I hope a slowly learned subtlety, I have to make up for the looks I haven’t got, but I am so happy, everything intrigues me, I have become a verb, instead of an adjective. It is as if this divorce were the key to free all my repressed energy, which is fierce from six years of boiling in a vacuum. I still am very interested in other men, or rather, after 6 years of having only one man attract me as much as Ted—what I wouldn’t give to see him now!—I am again interested in other men, but few men are both beautiful physically, tremendous lovers & creative geniuses as Ted is. I can ‘ t even imagine anybody ever making me feel passionate enough to have an affair, after him . And I am so bloody proud & particular. Well anyway, if I can only crawl back to a niche in London I should have enough men friends & enjoy dinners, plays, the peripherals.

One thing this has intensified is my dislike of my mother. She has identified so completely with me or what she thinks is me, which is really herself, that she can’t eat, sleep etc. What I see now I despise about my mother is her cravenness. Her wincing fear, her martyr’s smile. Never has she taken a bold move, she has always stuck quietly in one place, hoping noone would notice. Her letters to me are full of “one can’t afford one enemy”, “the world needs happy writing”. Basta! If I couldn’t afford an enemy, I couldn’t afford to live, & what the person from Belsen wants to hear is that someone else has been there, and knows the worst, too, that he is not a freak, not alone. Not that the birdies still go tweet-tweet.

When l get a good nanny my life will be possible. When I get back to London, & maybe some money, it will be heaven. I love you for listening. Each of your letters is so rich, they last like parables. Shall get the Fromm book.

With love,

Sylvia