Glenn Zucman

To Ted Hughes

RMS Queen Elizabeth
Friday morn, October 5, 1956

Dearest love Teddy…

This Cunard ship must keep sailing until it’s burned itself out; I believe in writing on everything including toilet paper. It is another ringing blue morning and bless it, it’s mine, now practicalia is done.

Began the epistles of St. Paul last night. I am standing at the crack, the hinge, the abyss, the suspension bridge between Greek and Christian thought. It awes me. I find the Christian writings of Augustine and Paul almost intolerable: the mystic workings of God’s plan, can, alas, be “known” (in the rich rounded sense of that word, distinguishing it from the mere “thinking knowledge” we use it to mean today) only by faith. That blind leap which so appalls me. And the whole tone of the Christian writings is so full of assurance— one can see the appeal here, the assurance of immortal life, reward and redemption, in contrast to the wistful hazardings of my dear Socrates who presented his view and hope of immortal life as a fable to the skeptical worldling rhetoricians around him.

Also, I find God hideously conceited; every time you want to argue with the apostles, the saints, about the origin of evil (my favorite black sheep which even drove Augustine almost wild), they blind you with some hocus-pocus about God’s inscrutability; having cake of doctrine but refusing to impart heavenly recipe for lesser cooks. God seems so often a rat— that same distaste I felt in reading Paradise Lost where God is such an egomaniac, spelling his objective pronoun Mee; “I do this in glorification of Mee…” Also, Paul is ridiculously smug about his celibate state; the flesh always embarrasses them so; they divide it completely from the soul; flesh means sin, nothing else; all men, because of Adam are born in sin, conceived in sin, etc.

Now this low view of the body, the senses, the flesh, is intolerable to me: “The interests of the flesh are hostile to God.” They speak of marriage as a regrettable necessity, allowing it as a kind of lesser evil, but smugly asserting: “He who does not marry will be found to have done better… I would like,” says pretty Paul, “all men to be as I am.” Now I, in my pagan earth-mother way, glorify my God through the flesh; through your flesh; and through our multitudes of unborn children. I find it horrible to cut the flesh from the soul and starve it, for thus it looses its roots in the earth and in turn starves the soul; this is my own private doctrine, and will come in many poems; it is my answer to the Christians and Kathleen Raine. I feel it my place as a singing woman; God how these writings stimulate my thinking, though; and I’m just humbly beginning. Tell me if you object to my tentative philosophizing rant, darling one. It helps no end to write it out to you.

I loved your letter this morning; barged down in midst of a painful still correct breakfast and read it over three cups of coffee. I like your poem very much; will ruminate on it, and write about it in a little while…

I miss you like hell. Certain words in the bible are like lovely clear sustaining water; you should cleave to me, it says; I honestly believe that by some mystic uniting we have become one flesh; I am simply sick, physically sick, without you. I cry; I lay my head on the floor; I choke, hate eating; hate sleeping, or going to bed; and am perpetually freezing cold. When will the Word, these words I cram my eye with, assuage this hunger for your sweet incredibly dear flesh; I never knew before what a newborn ghost must feel— I have somehow lost my most darling one; it is so strange to me— never before in my life have I been parted from one I love so immeasurably more than myself; my god, do let me be with you soon–

Teddy I love you so it is simply murdering me. And I am no baby really; but you are my own self for which I exist, somehow being father, brother, husband, son, in all one, the whole male principle of the world, in you, and without you how barren that world is, and sterile.

Your books came, and the dear letter, and the sweet note from your mother —thank her for me. I will work some livable existence out if this, but only by freezing my most vital parts.

Must stop ranting or you will weary and flag each time you get a fat envelope. Wrote a poem yesterday, and another today, very slight, probably— I lose perspective away from our tennis-partnered volleyings of opinion; here’s the shorter: will send the other tomorrow with talk of your fine one:

Touch and Go

Sing praise for statuary:
For those anchored attitudes
And staunch stone eyes that stare
Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot
At some steadfast mark
Beyond the inconstant green
Gallop and flick of light
In this precarious park

Where vivid children twirl
Like colored tops through time
Nor stop to understand
How all their play is touch-and-go:
But, Go! they cry, and the swing
Arcs up to the tall tree tip;
Go! and the merry-go-round
Hauls them round with it.

And I, like the children, caught
In the mortal active verb,
Let my transient eye break a tear
For each quick, flaring game
Of child, leaf and cloud,
While on this same fugue, unmoved,
Those stonier eyes look,
Safe-socketed in rock.

The other poem’s for you and probably, like most plaints, keepable only because it is done in love; my darling darling Teddy. Tell me how soon I may see you —

your own wife

sylvia