{"id":116,"date":"1960-02-18T17:12:35","date_gmt":"1960-02-18T22:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/?p=116"},"modified":"2019-04-26T14:49:03","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T18:49:03","slug":"116-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/116-2\/","title":{"rendered":"February 18th, 1960"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div class=\"h5p-iframe-wrapper\"><iframe id=\"h5p-iframe-6\" class=\"h5p-iframe\" data-content-id=\"6\" style=\"height:1px\" src=\"about:blank\" frameBorder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"February 18th, 1960\"><\/iframe><\/div><div class=\"h5p-iframe-wrapper\"><iframe id=\"h5p-iframe-8\" class=\"h5p-iframe\" data-content-id=\"8\" style=\"height:1px\" src=\"about:blank\" frameBorder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"February 18th, 1960\"><\/iframe><\/div><\/p>\n<h2>Transcript:<\/h2>\n<p>3 Chalcot Square, London N.W.1<\/p>\n<p>Thursday morning<\/p>\n<p>February 18, 1960<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Dear Dr. Beuscher,<\/p>\n<p>I waited to write you until we had a London address &amp; I a London doctor, which took a lot longer than we expected. After Christmas &amp; New Year&#8217;s in Yorkshire with Ted&#8217;s parents, sister, assorted &amp; continuous aunts, uncles &amp; cousins, we came to a cold, bleak &amp; utterly inhospitable London to look for (at first) a furnished apartment near one of the big parks &amp; central to plays, shops, bookstores etc. We started out living in a grisly unheated bed &amp; breakfast hotel which had the surprising advantage of being clean (very rare here) &amp; applied at all the main agencies, starting what amounted to a 2-week trek by bus, tube, foot, &amp; in occasional desperation, taxi, to the far-flung &amp; dirty corners of the great city, finding flats, with 2 exceptions, dark, dank, full of coal dust &amp; of expense that would have been laughable had the agents not kept straight faces. I felt miserable &amp; ponderous in my 7th month, without anything resembling a nest to feather, &amp; Ted felt equally badly &amp; grim. We moved in with a German(she)-Welsh(he) couple &amp; their 2-year old daughter in a condemned slum which was amazingly cosy in spite of no bathroom, where we could cook our meals, &amp; the only other couple we knew in London, the American poet W.S. Merwin &amp; his energetic, middle-aged, thrice-married British wife, began having us to heartening dinners, calling influential friends, agencies, etc. &amp; ended up in introducing me to my (their) doctor, whom I like immediately, so we limited our search to the Regent\u2019s Park area. Against all our first resolves, we took on an unfurnished flat to be &#8220;ready&#8221; on Feb.1st (no walls, no floors when we first saw it) &amp; the Merwins promised to set us up in most necessary furnishings out of their capacious Victorian attic.<\/p>\n<p>So here we are, 18 days after moving in, with the builders still cementing foundations, reinforcing the roof &amp; whistling cheerfully. We are on the 3rd floor in a newly renovated house, airy, light, overlooking a green square with benches \u2018Chalcot Square Gardens\u2019, 2 minutes from my doctor&#8217;s house &amp; office, 2 minutes from Primrose Hill (which overlooks all flat-heeled London) &amp; Regent&#8217;s Park with its superb zoo (we can hear the lions, they say, on hot summer nights), bird sanctuary, formal gardens&#8212;play areas for children &amp;, I feel, the ideal place for the baby. We have been painting floors, walls, making bookcases, stripping old painted cupboards &amp; sandpapering chairs &amp; are this weekend in sight of a halt. Have invested in a superb gas stove, refrigerator &amp; enormous bed &amp; are borrowing chairs, tables etc. from the Merwins attic until we can pick up things we like gradually at 2nd hand shops. My great wish now is a London house of our own, with its own garden. It\u2019s only a few minutes from here by subway or bus to Piccadilly, Charing Cross &amp; Trafalgar Square. Now things are settling down, I can&#8217;t think of anywhere else in the world I&#8217;d rather live &amp; have no desire to return to America at all.<\/p>\n<p>The obstetrician-half of my 2-doctor team is a young, kind &amp; very good fellow (who trained at University College Hospital) who I am seeing free, on the System. As I am too late to register at a hospital, I am having the baby at home &amp; very happy about it&#8212;I think hospital labor wards bothered me as much as anything, &amp; I will have all the care here (analgesia, whiffs of gas &amp; air etc.) I&#8217;d get in a hospital (immediate emergency squads if anything goes wrong) plus the privacy of my home, Ted&#8217;s presence, &amp; the continued care of my midwife&#8212;a wiry, golden-haired, tough &amp; kindly ^[Irish] woman of 40 or so, who came to see me last week at home &amp; assessed my caketins for afterbirth receptacles etc. Over here it is all \u201cnatural\u201d childbirth&#8212;making the mother do the work, with limited analgesia, in the ordinary cases, &amp; breast-feeding for ages&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>I get, by the way, a half-price pink of milk (2 \u00bd cups here) a day on the System, plus no expense at all for the baby. I don\u2019t have any GrantlyDickRead illusions, but feel I have made the best arrangements for my own odd psychic setup&#8212;the doctor\u2019s promised to be there at the delivery in addition to the midwife &amp; she\u2019ll come twice a day for 2 weeks to help me learn how the baby is bathed, nursed etc. Do let me know what you think about this!<\/p>\n<p>Another nice thing: I just heard from the British publishes Wm. Heinemann (they do Somerset Maugham, Erskine Caldwell, DHLawrence ^[etc.] an enthusiastic acceptance of my 1<sup>st<\/sup> book of poems (THE COLOSSUS), a third of which I wrote this fall: 50 poems in all. They\u2019ll be bringing it out next autumn &amp; sending it about to publishes in America. So baby &amp; 1<sup>st<\/sup> book are well on the way. I\u2019d love to hear Nicholas or Rebecca is due March 27<sup>th<\/sup>. With Ted\u2019s 2<sup>nd<\/sup> book of poems LUPERCAL (Harper\u2019s will import copies later this year).<\/p>\n<p>Love, Sylvia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transcript: 3 Chalcot Square, London N.W.1 Thursday morning February 18, 1960 &nbsp; Dear Dr. Beuscher, I waited to write you until we had a London address &amp; I a London doctor, which took a lot longer than we expected. After Christmas &amp; New Year&#8217;s in Yorkshire with Ted&#8217;s parents, sister, assorted &amp; continuous aunts, uncles&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/116-2\/\">Read More <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">February 18th, 1960<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2380,"featured_media":209,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}