I think: a Wuthering Heights article for red-shoe money. Correct the word in my Monitor poem. Start a poem for the bed book. A story on the hospital. About the affair of Starbuck" & Sexton. A double story, August Lighthill and the Other Women. Also about the children, seen through Jan's eyes. Here is horror. And all the details. Get life in spurts in stories, then the novel will come. A way. By the time I get to Yaddo, three good publishable stories and the Bed Book done!

  April 25 Saturday

  Clear day, dragged up as usual early, but exhausted, too much so to write, so worked on polishing up essay on Withens only to be stopped in title from final typing by not knowing spelling Withens or Withins.

  Two visits yesterday: to Mrs. Lamb, the terrible invalid downstairs who has lived in her small two-room apartment for 25 years and not been out of her room for two years. Her great monstrous fat body propped on a worn green plush chair with oddly high legs, so her elephantine legs, in thick beige stockings, could be propped on a footstool. The little cleaning woman ("so poor, just herself and her sister, they have nothing. I gave her some icecream my taximan brought today") going out as I came in seemed to have accomplished nothing. A sickening smell of medecines, stuffiness, old lady-sweat, as of rooms not opened for years. Dusty black telephones appeared in every corner, obviously so she wouldn't have to put herself out unduly to answer them. She wore a navyblue dress over her bulk with white buttons, innumerable white buttons, marching down the front and holding the material together with effort, little looped openings pulling at every notch. Her bigjowled face rested on her chest, queerly warted, and her greasy grey-yellowed hair hung in short strings ("I wanted to have a hairdresser come permanent it today, but she couldn't come, I hope you don't mind"). The smell gave me a headache. The room itself seemed a nightmare, an impossibility below our clean bright sweet-smelling place, and the more of a nightmare in being identical in shape with it. In spite of the cleaning woman, an oppressive sense of filth. Between Mrs. Lamb's high chair and the window were piles of dusty papers, mementos, boxes, from which she rummaged old pictures of her son, her grandchildren, her daughter in Egypt, dressed in jodphurs, taking pictures of the natives on the desert, and pictures of herself as an unbelievably attractive young girl in an hourglass dress, pouty and sultry, with, as her negro maid said "A Mae West figure". The old, dark surface of the photo, taken 50 years ago? Cast me into a pool of reveries, that such beauty should come to such a horrid mountain of immovable flesh, unable, because of her fat, to move out of her room for four years.

  The room: exactly like ours, but repulsive. A black swatch of blistered paint on the icebox, and black soot and grease smears fanning away from the stove on the walls and ceilings, the window frames hanging with soot and the windows too smeared to see through. A little fake green christmas tree with soapflakes and tinsel stood on a small table beside a clock. Bare floor, no rugs. She came from the family of Shaws, her son married a Shaw (no relation) and her daughter (about 45?) had a young man, also a Shaw, Louis Agassiz Shaw (Junior), and her daughter-in-laws uncle, or father, was also, oddly enough, named Louis Agassiz Shaw. I shuddered to think of the state of the bedroom. She severed the muscles of her legs in jumping out of a car and stepping on a board walk unfastened at one end. Stories of burglars upstairs, her dog Crumpet saved from asphyxiation at the Animal Rescue League, the Count and Countess de Longay in our apartment, an old glassed-in bookcase: Castles of England. Daughter came, warm, solid, much improved atmosphere; left after two hours.

  May 3, 1959 Sunday

  A Day of Yawns after a fantastic spell of work from coffee to midnight last night. I am now hungrily putting the last minutes of cooking onto breaded veal in cream, green parsley rice and rather soggy yellow squash, and very weary. Washed hair. Retyped pages, a messy job, on the volume of poems I should be turning in to Houghton Mifflin this week. But AS is there ahead of me, with her lover GS writing New Yorker odes to her and both of them together: felt our triple martini afternoons at the Ritz breaking up. That memorable afternoon at G's monastic and miserly room on Pinckney "You shouldn't have left us": where is responsibility to lie? I left, yet felt like a brown winged moth around a rather meagre candle flame, drawn. That is over. As Snodgrass would say.

  I wrote a book yesterday. Maybe I'll write a postscript on top of this in the next month and say I've sold it. Yes, after half a year of procrastinating, bad feeling and paralysis, I got to it yesterday morning, having lines in my head here and there, and Wide-Awake Will and Stay-Uppity Sue very real, and bang. I chose ten beds out of the long list of too fancy and ingenious and abstract a list of beds, and once I'd begun I was away and didn't stop till I typed out and mailed it (8 double spaced pages only!) to the Atlantic Press. The Bed Book, by Sylvia Plath.

  Funny how doing it has freed me. It was a bat, a bad-conscience bat brooding in my head. If I didn't do it I would do nothing. A ready-made good idea and an editor writing to say she couldn't get the idea out of her head. So I did it. I feel if the Atlantic is stupid enough to reject it someone else will snap it up, and better so, if they will also take my poems. I have two ideas, one about a Lonesome Park and the other about a Town on a Very Steep Hill (for Christmas or Easter). Maybe I can work out one of those before I get my first rejection of the ms. Suddenly it frees me - - - and Ted too. I can go to the magazine rack this morning and get a NY Times, a NYorker, a Writers Mag and not feel drowned or sick. Me, I will make my place, a queer, rather smallish place, but room and view enough to be happy in.

  The Monitor's accepting my first article "The Kitchen of the Fig Tree" for the Home Forum Page opened up a vista of $50 checks for an extension of my letter-writing habits. I have "A Walk to Withins" written and ready, and an idea for "Watching the Water Voles." They are Christian Scientist in their religious article and rather pagan on the rest of the page.

  Read article on radium-dial painters, doomed in the amazingly radium-stupid 20's to die of internal radiation, in the NYorker. A STORY by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The usual flawlessly realized stuff with a pathos-or-bathos point "The Quality of Mercy". I think I could, with work and thought, write for them. But am far far from it. This week have kept all mornings free and must work on my Sweetie Pie story and figure what it's about. Sometimes, with the NYorker, I'm not so sure that matters! My joy now will be my first Children's Book accepted, and my first New Yorker story. All this throws the lugubrious balance away from my book of poems which may well improve by more maturing. If it only won the Yale, all would be fine. This year, I think, is a year of maturing. I am joyous in affirming my writing at last.

  Wednesday May 13, 1959

  How many mornings pass like this one? Seed-time, I say. I read my notebooks on Spain, take out a leaflet about "The Discontented Mayor" (prodded by an Esquire article on Spain) and browse and muse over working it up into a short-short vignette for Esquire or possibly Mile. About to turn to that infuriating story which isn't sure of its own point "Sweetie Pie & The Gutter Men". Very good possibilities, if only I can get it out of its last-summer fix. Wrote a pretty-pretty poem yesterday "In Midas' Country", one of those ideal New Yorker pieces. Ironic to see if they buy/ Wish I'd hear from "Johnny Panic": I think that is publishable. Cooler and grey, with that city-canyon wetness after a spring rain.

  Bothered about RB: I seem to want to cover everything up, like a cat its little crappings with sand, perhaps before leaving for California?

  Well, I must bring up those pressure points: suicide, deflowering, T's sister, and present writing; lack of rooted social life, yet not minding it; lack of children. Today. Also concern about mind getting lazy. Learning languages.

  My "Bull of Bendylaw" book of poems is much better arranged. Also, at this rate, with "Arts In Society" accepting "Sculptor", "The Goring" (which I was beginning to think unsalable) and "Aftermath", I have only 13 poems to publish before all 45 are in print, and these poems should not be too hard to sell.

  Ten, the clocks strike. Yesterday was tropical: rain, fearful humidity, sweating, low ragged wet clouds, heat lightning. We tossed till midnight when a cooler air set in.

  Mailed the ms. of Ted's Children's Book "Meet My Folks!" both to Harper's and Faber's. This book should sell like hotcakes. I reread my notes about Ted's children's fables written three summers ago in Spain, how they should be a classic, and now see how obviously unsalable they were in such form, and hope my judgments have matured as I think they have. Well, in my book of 45 poems there are only 10 surviving of the book I sent Auden at the Yale Series two summers ago. And I have written a lot more than 35 since then, too.

  Now, to see what work I can accomplish before I leave for RB.

  Monday May 18

  Set-back last week. Got Monitor article on watervoles rejected which I too lightly and confidently predicted would earn me an easy $50. I am not wise to even such a common market? It did me good. I got mad, then grim, then industrious and resigned. Finished, all of a piece, "Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men" which has been on my back for about, almost, a year. Have ideas, ideas. I think it is a damn good story. Much more accomplished, working three characters, conversation, than "Johnny Panic" which I have not got back from Accent yet, sent sometime last fall. Am waiting to get name of story editor of NY from Stanley. It will be by far the best story I have sent them yet.

  Ted & I have our two children's books sent off, not a word, of course, yet. His to Harper's and Faber's, mine to the Atlantic Press. I have rumbling ideas for "The Lonesome Park", only must figure how to get people in it.

  Changed title of poetry book in an inspiration to "The Devil of The Stairs", which I hope has never been used before. "The Bull of Bendylaw", which was catching, had an obscure point, the idea of energy breaking through ceremonial forms, but this title encompasses my book & "Explains" the poems of despair, which is as deceitful as hope is. Hope this goes through.

  Dreamed last night of being a matron with seven daughters, like dolls, whom I was to dress in party dresses all graded rose-colors, yet I found blue and purple dresses among the yellow and pink. Great confusion. Have they their gloves, their pocketmoney in their pocketbooks. One daughter was large, blond, freckled, Arden Tapley, only how changed from her innocent youth. Dreamt also George Starbuck had a book of poems published by Houghton Mifflin, a spectacular book, full of fat substantial poems I hadn't seen, called "Music Man". The endpapers were decorated as in a childrens book, ducks, colored Jack Horners, etc. He also send an envelope full of profound jottings on scraps of paper: To my dear friends. Zany epigrams and the like.

  Worked on my braided rug the last two days after a stall of a couple of months. A lovely thing, the rich new blues and reds and red-and-black weaves I got with Shirley. Looks like a stained glass window. Shall risk having it cleaned today, I think.

  Idea for novel, still titled Falcon Yard: story of three women, or mainly one: C—, with her illegitimate baby and mental hospital, just as Marty, her closest tagalong friend was discovering she couldn't have a baby. Story of C—'s alley, which will be named Falcon Yard. Much easier to work up because not personal. At Yaddo? Must read more contemporary novels.

  Last night, down Hanover Street by all the elaborate Italian florists, with their great paper bouquets of flowers, heart-shaped and scalloped, and the innumerable pastery shops with seven-tiered wedding cakes, came upon "Moon Street". A poem or story deserves that name.

  Wednesday May 20th

  All I need now is to hear that GS or MK" has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children's book. AS has her book accepted at HM and this afternoon will be drinking champagne. Also an essay accepted by PJHH," the copy-cat. But who's to criticize a more successful copy-cat. Not to mention a poetry reading at McLean. And GS at supper last night smug as a cream-fed cat, very pleased indeed, for AS is in a sense his answer to me. And now my essay, on Withins, will come back from PJHH, and my green-eyed fury prevent me from working. Or drive me into hibernation & more work. Tell T nothing. He generalized about the article on water-voles he hadn't read, expatiating from Pjhh's note: Oh, all your stuff, the trouble with it is it's too general. So I won't bother showing him the story on Sweetie Pie I've done, keep the viper out of the household & send it out on my own. My first accepted story would give me intense joy: but even without it, I shall plod on and on, free as I am at present and for a year of the need to work, free as yet of children. Fight last night, he not bothering to perceive how intolerable it is to me to work (ho, have I worked? very little) and feel everything stagnating on my desk, and I lying awake and tense, the air fearfully wet and hot, the sheets damp and heavy. Got up finally and read all of Philip Roth's "Goodbye Columbus" which except for the first novella I found excellent, rich, and always fascinating, entertaining. Even laughed. Got to bed at 3. Bad sleep. Woke to the same hostile silences. He did make coffee. Banged about. I showered and felt better and in this sweet nauseous thick air am waiting to get mail, rejections, to go to B (am very ashamed to tell her of immediate jealousies - - - the result of my extra-professional fondness for her, which has inhibited me) and then the Sultans will disarrange the day, and the Booths for dinner. He should be some comfort, he is nice, if almost pathetically serious and earnest.

  What to do with anger, ask her. One thing to say: Yes, I want the world's praise, money & love, and am furious with anyone, especially with anyone I know or has had a similar experience, getting ahead of me. Well, what to do when this surges up over & over? Last night I knew that mother didn't matter - - - she is all for me, but I have dissipated her image and she becomes all editors and publishers and critics and the World, and I want acceptance there, and to feel my work good and well-taken. Which ironically freezes me at my work, corrupts my nunnish labor of work-for-itself-as-its-own-reward. Hit this today.

  Learn from Roth. Study, study. Go inward. There it is pure. Or may be, one day.

  Shower, keep clean, enjoy colors and animals. People, if possible. How I love the Baskins. The only people I feel are a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no smarm. I MUST WRITE ABOUT THE THINGS OF THE WORLD WITH NO GLAZING. I know enough about love, hate, catastrophe to do so.

  Braided violently on rug, which is at cleaner's, and felt anger flow harmlessly away into the cords of bright soft colored wool. It will be not a prayer rug but an anger rug. Only hope the cleaner's today do a good job. That is a relief, to have that to do. Think I will go to the sailing place. By myself.

  Monday May 25

  Again, again, the grumpy fruitless cramps. The two or three odd days of hope blasted and all to begin again. My Maudlin poem is a prophetic little piece. I get the pleasure of a prayer in saying it: Gibbets with her curse the moon's man. Of course it would wait till today, when I was going to make lunch at Marcia's (which I shall call to cancel) then my job at Harvard then the Poetry Society with the triumphant AS & GS and then dinner with Hitchen" and some woman or other which I shall have to cook up. Oh crud. The two things I would like are a book (or story in the NY) accepted and a baby. After all my surmising about Marcia and Mike I don't feel like going through anything similar myself. Must not be accusing, although I feel like it.

  Max" came yesterday. Odd, how I dislike him. A horrible rich unction to his voice. A mental effort to say he may be exemplary, but his aura is all wrong. I couldn't look at him. He made me sick. Short, too-white skin, red hair, a sense of flabbiness, not any bite or grit. I don't want to see him again. Except that I would like to see where my father went to school in Wisconsin.

  The gripes don't let up in spite of aspirin. Aspirin make me feel sick. It will be a bad day all round. My face looks yellow and podgy as cheese.

  Reading V. Woolf's The Years. With rain, she can unite a family, here in London, there in the country, in Oxford. But too disparate. By skipping five, eleven, years, and from person to person, suddenly a little girl is in her fifties with grey hair, and so we learn time passes, all moves. But the descriptions, the observations, the feelings caught and let slip, are fine, a luminous web catching it all in, this is life, this is time.

  I now am in pain, and a grinding frustrated pain. Earlier in the morning, the sun, coming over the buildings in the east caught and illuminated to a bright virid glow the ivy, the new ivy, on the red brick wall of the garden below in Acorn Street. The leaves in Louisberg Square are so thick now I can only see the greek togaed statue as a nobbed pale grey stone, with dapples of light and shadow. Dare I take another pill? If the pain would shut up; but then I'd be sicker.

  Brains for supper last night. Ugh, I gag to think of it. I made them with a pungent wine sauce and they were ghastly. Even Ted couldn't eat all of them. Soft, flabby, obscene meat: food for mental invalids. Gah.

  Another fresh May morning gone to hell, for no reason but this crampiness. If childbirth pangs are real, why aren't cramps real? And why should I have them if I think they're ridiculous?

  The chicken, raw, wrapped in paper in the icebox, dropped a drop of blood on my pristine white cheesecake. Dreamed of catching a very tiny white rabbit last night: a menstruating dream?

  Sunday May 31

  A heavenly, clear, cool Sunday, a clean calendar for the week ahead, and a magnificent sense of space, creative power and virtue. Virtue. I wonder if it will be rewarded. I have written six stories this year, and the three best of them in the last two weeks! (Order: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, The Fifteen Dollar Eagle, The Shadow, Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men, Above the Oxbow, and "This Earth Our Hospital"). Very good titles. I have a list of even better. Ideas flock where one plants a single seed.

  I feel that this month I have conquered my Panic Bird. I am a calm, happy and serene writer. With a pleasant sense of learning and being better with every story, and at the same time the spurred tension that comes from knowing they fall short, in this way or that, from what I see ahead, ten stories, twenty stories from now.