night, just before Ted and Sylvia’s arrival in the park, another woman had tried to scare one off with a flashlight and been mauled to death. This gave Sylvia the idea of, in Ted’s later phrase, transforming their own ‘dud scenario into a fiction’.60 ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ is one of her most effective short stories. It concerns a couple called Norton and Sadie. Norton was the surname of both a former boyfriend and the character in the television sitcom The Honeymooners whose vocal mannerisms inspired Yogi Bear.61 Sadie was one of the names Sylvia thought of using for the autobiographical protagonist of ‘Falcon Yard’. They count fifty-eight bears as they drive round the Grand Loop at Yellowstone. When they are woken in the night by the sound of another bear, Norton goes outside and sees the smashed car window. He waves a flashlight to scare the bear away, but is cuffed over the head and killed: ‘It was the last bear, her bear, the fifty-ninth.’ The sinister aspect of the story is that Norton’s arrogance has in some sense made Sadie want him to die: in daydreams, he imagined himself as a widower,
a hollow-cheeked, Hamletesque figure in somber suits, given to standing, abstracted, ravaged by casual winds, on lonely promontories and at the rail of ships, Sadie’s slender, elegant white body embalmed, in a kind of bas relief, on the central tablet of his mind. It never occurred to Norton that his wife might outlive him. Her sensuousness, her pagan enthusiasms, her inability to argue in terms of anything but her immediate emotions – this was too flimsy, too gossamery a stuff to survive out from under the wings of his guardianship.62
Ted gave his own version of the story in the longest poem in Birthday Letters, also called ‘The 59th Bear’. In the rear-view mirror of memory, he vividly revisited ‘the off rear window of the car’,
Wrenched out – a star of shatter splayed
From a single talon’s leverage hold,
A single claw forced into the hair-breadth odour
Had ripped the whole sheet out. He’d leaned in
And on claw hooks lifted out our larder.
He’d left matted hairs. I glued them in my Shakespeare.63
Whereas Sylvia’s story exits the husband to death, pursued by the fifty-ninth bear, Ted captures a trophy of the animal encounter and gives it to his Shakespeare. One may assume that he pasted the matted hairs somewhere near the famous stage direction in The Winter’s Tale. He ended the poem by reflecting on Sylvia’s short story, reading the bear as an image of the death that was hurtling towards her rather than her husband.
After leaving Yellowstone, they drove through the Grand Teton mountain range, stopping for photographs, then south to Salt Lake City and Big Cottonwood Canyon, where, as a reward after their immensely long drive, they treated themselves to a huge meal of Kentucky fried chicken, rolls and honey, potatoes and gravy. They swam in the great Salt Lake, discovering with amazement and delight that you really didn’t sink, could almost sit up on the water as if in an armchair. Then it was across the desert into the sunset, passing into Nevada, where they stopped for the night to camp, Sylvia cooking the last of their Yellowstone trout, ‘with corn niblets, a tomato and lettuce salad and milk’.64 At last they reached California, camping near Lake Tahoe, then stopping in ‘the lovely palm-tree shaded Capitol Park of Sacramento’ – ‘the site of the mine that started the gold rush’ – in 114-degree heat.65 They liked the holiday feel of California, the mix of mountains, forests, fertile farmland. Sylvia wrote of the lushness, Ted of the fruit.
At last they reached the sea, intending to camp at Stinson Beach State Park, just over 20 miles outside San Francisco. But their guidebook was out of date. The supposed campsite had been turned into a parking lot. Sylvia, desperately tired from yet another mammoth drive, was on the verge of tears. Ted suggested that they should try their luck in town. They had cold beer and fried chicken at a café and the generous owner suggested that they park their car in his lot and sleep under the stars on the beach. For Sylvia, it was one of the best nights of her life, not least because she sensed new life quickening inside her. Her period was due and it had not yet come. Away from the stress of Smith, she had become pregnant early in the summer.
Ted did not quite share the sense of climax. He wrote several drafts of a poem about Stinson Beach under the title ‘Early August 1959’, but did not include it in Birthday Letters. ‘We got to the Pacific,’ he wrote. ‘What was so symbolic about the Pacific?’ Whatever it was, they had made it. But the sunset wasn’t as spectacular as it should have been and it was foggy when they woke up in the morning. Still, they had ‘kept to the programme of romance / Slept in our sleeping bags under the stars / Tried to live up to the setting’. He was then cheered when ‘a phone-call from within sight of the sea’ brought the news that Faber and Faber had accepted his second volume of poetry.66 They were not sure about his proposed title ‘The Feast of Lupercal’, because there had been two recent novels of exactly that name (one of them a Faber bestseller), so he decided to call it ‘Lupercalia’ instead.67
They dipped into San Francisco to get the car window repaired. Then it was a beach camp halfway to Los Angeles, then a relaxing stay with Sylvia’s Aunt Frieda in Pasadena. Her hot water and other amenities were much appreciated and her name, with its echo of D. H. Lawrence’s feisty wife, gave them an idea for the baby, should it prove to be a girl. Their eastward journey began with the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon. At that grandest of all sights, ‘America’s Delphi’, they sought a blessing on the baby in Sylvia’s womb as a reward for their pilgrimage. Navajo dancers, standing on the rim of the greatest gorge in the world, beat a drum, sounding an echo that thirty years later Ted imagined he could hear, faintly, in the voice of his daughter.68 The primitive power of the drumbeat would become a key resource in his theatre work. More prosaically, when they returned to the car their water-cooling bag, which had crossed the Mojave slung under the front bumper, had been stolen.
From the Grand Canyon they drove all the way across to New Orleans, then north to Tennessee to stay with Luke Myers’s family. The gigantic trip ended with sightseeing in Washington DC and a stay with Sylvia’s Uncle Frank near Philadelphia, before they at last returned home to the hot tubs and home baking of New England. Aurelia thought that they both looked tanned and well, but Sylvia was tired and worried about the pregnancy. She had a history of gynaecological complications, so she still did not feel sure that there really was a baby growing inside her.
Yaddo is an artists’ community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs. It was founded in 1900 by a wealthy financier called Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, who wrote poetry herself. Left without immediate heirs by the deaths of their four young children, the Trasks decided to bequeath their palatial home to future generations of writers, composers, painters and other creative artists. Katrina had a vision of generations of talented men and women yet unborn walking the lawns of Yaddo, ‘creating, creating, creating’. The idea was to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in peaceful, green surroundings. The great American short-story writer John Cheever would write that the ‘forty or so acres on which the principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community and perhaps the world’.69
When Ted and Sylvia arrived just after Labor Day, the main house had been closed for winter. They were given spacious rooms in the clapperboard West House, among the trees. Each of them had a separate ‘studio’, Sylvia’s on the top floor of the house and Ted’s out in the woods – the perfect place for him. ‘A regular little house to himself’, Sylvia wrote to her mother, ‘all glassed in and surrounded by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, a cot, and huge desk’.70