Transcript:

Court Green

North Tawton

Devon.

July 11, 1962

 

Dear Dr. Beuscher,

I honestly hope you feel you can answer this letter by return, as I am suddenly, after all that happy stuff I wrote you some while ago, at sea, and a word from you I could carry around with me would sustain me like the Bible sustains others. I didn’t say in my last letter how ghastly that sounded to have gone through, about your father. It sounded so close in its way to my own trouble that I was astounded. I still credit you, I think, with some vestige of supernatural powers which can transcend the factual lumps of experience and make them harmless, or at least, not seriously or permanently wounding . What I wanted to say, without knowing quite how, is that I am very very sorry.

What I need some good wise word on is the situation between Ted & me. As you can tell from my last letter, I thought I had at last stepped into the life that would be the growing-pot for us both—the alternation of outdoor work in the garden & fishing for Ted, with each of us writing more and better than ever in our separate studies, and the two beautiful babies and nothing to worry about but fallout, I felt Life Begins at 30. Then everything went queer. Ted began to leap up in the morning & intercept the mail. He began to talk, utterly unlike him, of how he could write & direct film scripts, how he was going to win the Nobel Prize, how he had been asleep all the time we were married, recoiling, as the French say, so he could jump the better. How he wanted to experience everybody & everything, there was a monster in him, a dictator. Und so weiter. He would come out with these things after spurts of lovemaking as in our honeymoon days, asking me like a technician, did like this, did I like that. Then round on me for holding hands & being jealous of other women.

I just felt sick, as if I were the practise board for somebody else. I get these semi-clairvoyant states, which I suppose are just diabolic intuition. I picked up the phone & a nasty man’s voice asked if Ted could take a call from London. Ted always wants me to find out who it is, so I asked, & the man said he was sorry, the person didn’t want to say. I felt thick with my own dumbness & called Ted. It was a woman, saying “Can I see you?” He said she didn’t say her name & he had no idea who it was. I was pretty sure who it was. A girl who works in an ad agency in London, very sophisticated, and who, with her second poet-husband, took over the lease on our London flat. We’d had them down for a weekend, and I’d walked in on them ^[(ted + she]) Tête-à-tête in the kitchen & Ted had shot my a look of pure hate. She smiled & stared at me curiously the rest of the weekend. She is very destructive— had so many abortions when she was young she only miscarries now, wants to die before she gets old, tried to kill her first husband with a knife when he married another woman, after she herself had deceived him; now she thinks her second husband is ‘Past his best, poor thing.’ Calls her first husband on the phone (getting a man to ask for him, to get round the wife) and meets him for lunch. She kept calling a while, for no apparent reason, seeming almost speechless when she got me. Then, it seems reasonable to believe, she repeated her usual trick to get through to Ted. And when I got up to his study, to clean up as I do, empty envelopes in her hand were lying round, dated during all the time he’d been leaping up for mail. Ted said “No,” she couldn’t see him, over the phone. But I was standing there, stunned. Then the next day, after a night of no sleep & horrid talk (me asking him for god’s sake to say who it was so It would stop being Everybody), he took the train to London for a “holiday.” He assured me, in a flash of his old self, that me & the children were what he really loved & would come back to & he was not going to London to lie about & had not touched another woman since we were married. I have discontinued the phone, for I can’t stand waiting, every minute, to hear that girl breathing at the end of it, my voice at her fingertips, my life & happiness on her plate.

I suppose this all sounds very naive to you . It is, after all, what seems to happen to everybody. Only I am not, as Ted says, blasé enough. I care to a frenzy. I could never satisfy myself by “getting even” with other men: other men mean nothing to me—they are repulsive. This is one thing I want you to see: Ted is so fantastic ally unique—beautiful, physically wonderful, brilliant, loving, eager for me to do my own work, without (as I thought) a lie or deceit in his body. It is the lying that kills me. I can face nasty truths, unpleasant facts. I am sure a possessive wife would have driven most men mad before this. But I just don’t have the ability to care nothing about other women chasing Ted. He is very famous over here, and a real catch. Women are always writing him, drooling about his poems etc., begging him to tell them about  his life, etc. As you may imagine, movie stars have nothing on a handsome male poet. He seemed to want to flee all big publicity—TV & so on, & was furious when I let any cameramen into the house. But now it is different: I have been a jinx, a chain.

Well, if he would tell me the truth about the letters & phonecalls & his flying off, I would be. in some way purged. But now it balloons up before me like a great fantasy which I sense, but cannot limit to reality. I am not generous. His being with another woman, especially a woman who spites me & is dying to stop my creative work, like this one, makes me retch. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. It is because I feel I can never trust him again, and have been perhaps a fool to be so happy and trusting in the past.

If I could carry on normally, I might be more rational. But I keep having to run off to cry and be dry-sick as each image of that girl assaults me, and her pleasure at hearing me nonplussed on the phone, of taking my life and joy. I can’t imagine a life without Ted. But I am not like other wives who tolerate all—marriage to me is a kind of sanctity, faithfulness in every part, and I will not ever be able to love or make love again in happiness, with this looming in front of me. It is his wanting to deceive me that is so like this girl & unlike him.

What can I do? I would never in my life think of divorce, because I married till death and am his wife till death. He can have tarty women & bastards, but only one wife and her children. And that’s me. I am simply not cool & sophisticated  My marriage is the center of my being, I have given everything to it without reserve. Worst, my writing is killed by this mess. I write, not in compensation, out of sorrow, but from an overflow, a surplus, of joy, & my ability to criticize my work & do it well is my objectivity, which stems from happiness, not sorrow. The day after Ted left, I got the proofs of my first novel. It saved the day for me: I roared and roared, it was so funny and good. But then there is the big empty bed & I am like a desperado, & take the baby in with me. Then all night it is visions of that woman with Ted, her delight. I imagine idiocies—her coming to live here, me breaking her nose & knocking her teeth out. I think if she killed, or tried to knife, her first husband, she would quite like to kill me. And she is so outwardly sophisticated, so mocking. I have never learned the art & never will. I break up in pieces, cry, rave. I am proud. I will not be made a fool of. Let me learn the true things, not be diddled & betrayed. I think I am not good in the part of wronged wife. A wronged wife is at such a disadvantage because she feels so right, and this is my desperation. I hate the thing in Ted that can jeopardize and ruin everything like this and expect to have a wife-secretary-mother-dishwasher- housekeeper waiting to take him back, refreshed. Until the next letter, the next comeon. I have nothing to refresh me. I am left here, with the evidence of the phonecall, the evidence of the oddly coincidental departure , the evidence of my each sense . I can never forget or forgive this. I suppose people would tell me I am lucky—he seems to want us as home-base still. Well, I can ‘ t be any sort of sweet home base for stuff that makes me gag. I feel ugly and a fool, when I have so long felt beautiful & capable of being a wonderful happy mother and wife and writing novels for fun & money. I am just sick. What can I do?

To make things worse—or better—my mother is here for six weeks. She has taken over some of the meals & babvminding & freed us both to do our work & go off on day-jaunts. I was so happy. I get on pretty well with mother now, because I keep off the great controversies, and she is a real help & I make her feel this. But you can imagine how images repeat themselves—here I am, alone with my mother & the children! I am so numb I am only glad she looks after Frieda, because I am hollow as a zombie inside & without motion. My milk has soured or something, because the baby has been having diarrhea day and night since this bloody phonecall.

I have a feeling, when I try to look at what is I am sure my unique predicament (unique because I am unable to swallow this behavior as if it never was, unable to accept clean breaks, like divorce, because I am in spirit and body married forever to this one person, unable to forget), that people or you or anybody would say—let him go, let him get It out of his system. Well, what about my system? How do I get this other It out? This jealous retch, this body that comes, laughing, between my body & his body. If he would only say who & what it was. Then It would have limits. But this intangible, invisible, infinitely possible thing is killing me. How can I live without him? I mean, if I could write & garden & be happy with my babies, I could survive. But I am so sick & sleepless & jumpy all is a mess. I suppose it might be good if mother could go—she has just over 3 more weeks. I tell her nothing: Ted is on a holiday in London, to do some radio programs. She is good, doesn’t pry, makes herself scarce. She said the other day “I am so glad to see you so happy.” Well, that was the deathknell. I have been trying to start a 2nd novel & said laughingly to Ted: Now if I can just keep happy & peaceful for 6 weeks I can do it. Later he flew at me “Why should I limit myself by your happiness or unhappiness?”

Well, that’s it. I feel you, having been once divorced and being a psychiatrist, not an Anglican rector, will feel I am a dog-in-the-manger about divorce (which has not, by the way, really entered our talk, except that Ted says it would be a good thing ^[if] his older brother, whom he idolized, should get divorced—a stand-in for his own wish?) I simply would never do it. I honestly do believe I am wedded to Ted till death. Other men seem ants compared to him. I am physically attracted to no-one else. All the complexities of my soul & mind are involved inextricably with him. And I do feel I lead an independent life—I work, write, have my own art & reputation, my babies. Yet this is dirt in my mouth if I can’t trust and love him.

O I would be so grateful if you would sit down and send me some word. I can talk to no-one about this—mother, of course, least of all. She does not even know I have written a novel. She is in almost utter bliss. Please, please, do write me. I have got nothing but the bloody empty envelopes secreted by Ted in stupid places, and would like some word of my own. What can I do about the bloody lying? his refusal to come out & say: this is the way it is—I have seen so-and-so, it is she, not everybody, and you can bloody-well lump it. That would be salutary as a slap in the face. And then, how can I be, if he comes back? When I am full of hate, resentment, a wish to kill this bloody girl to whom my misery is just sauce. And how can I stop being miserable? I hate myself like this. I do need word !

Please write, right away, if you can.

With love,

Sylvia