through dozens of drafts before reaching its final form in Birthday Letters, was one of his first poems in the loose style of a journal.
Stepping further westward, they crossed Montana. This was real cattle country, empty wilderness, not unlike the Yorkshire Moors, but with grass and richer soil, and without any valleys. At roadside cafés, you got ‘steak the size of a plate, home-made berry pie piled with icecream, your coffee cup filled up as fast as you emptied it (for the price of just one cup)’.55 This was the real America, the generous and friendly people real Americans. After a long drive southwards, they arrived at the Yellowstone National Park, which was becoming more famous than ever with the advent on television the previous year of the animated cartoon character Yogi Bear. Ted told his parents that it was like the Alps, but with bears. They counted nineteen on the road in the first 30 miles after entering the National Park. The bears would wander up to people’s cars and stand on their hind legs, hoping for food. ‘People get regularly mauled, trying to feed them,’ Edith and Bill were informed.56 On their first night in the park, Ted heard one sniffing round their tent, which was only 10 feet from a trash can.
On the second night they returned at dusk from a drive around the Grand Loop of the park, seeing the geysers and the hot pools, only to find a large black bear standing over their trash can. It lumbered off when it was caught in their headlights. They locked their food in the boot of the car and washed down the picnic table and benches. At ‘the blue moonlit hour of quarter to three’ Sylvia was woken from a dream in which their car was blown to pieces with a great crash. The crashing sound was real: her first thought was that a bear had smashed open the car with a great cuff and started eating the engine (a seed here for Ted’s story about the metal-devouring Iron Man?). Ted, also woken by the crash, had the more prosaic thought that the bear had knocked their cooking pans off the picnic table. They lay listening to ‘grunts, snuffles, clattering can lids’. Then there was ‘a bumpity rolling noise as the bear bowled a tin’ past their tent. Sylvia peered out of the tent screen and, ‘not ten feet away’, saw a huge bear ‘guzzling at a tin’. In the morning they discovered that the noise was that of ‘the black-and-gilt figured cookie tin’ in which they kept their fruit and nut bars. Though they had secured most of their food in the boot, this had been on the back seat of the car inside Sylvia’s closed red bag. The bear had smashed the car window, torn the bag open and found the tin, which it had also managed to open. The bag had also contained Ritz crackers and Hydrox cookies, which had been eaten, and a selection of postcards, which she found in the morning among the debris left from the visit. The top card, a picture of moose antlers, was turned upside down. And a postcard of a bear was face up on the ground with the paw print of an actual bear on it.57
Having consumed the contents of the cookie tin, the bear had gone away. Ted and Sylvia had lain awake, terrified that it might come back and rip its way into their tent. It did indeed return, just as dawn broke. Ted stood up and looked out of the window of the tent to see it slurping away at the oranges that they had left on the ledge behind the back seat of the car. ‘It’s the big brown one’, he told Sylvia. They had heard that this was the nasty sort. Scared off by the sound of ‘The Camp Ranger’s car, doing the morning rounds’, it ran away, tripped on a guy rope and nearly tumbled into Ted and Sylvia’s tent.58
The story went around the camp. A Yellowstone regular told them to smear the tent with kerosene because bears hated the smell. Someone else suggested red pepper, but they decided that the best thing would be to move to a campsite higher up the hillside and not too close to any garbage cans. Ted appended a handwritten postscript to Sylvia’s typewritten letter home: ‘Well, I wanted to tell about the bear, but Sivvy’s done that better than I even remembered it.’59
In the washroom, Sylvia told the story to another woman, who replied that the bears were particularly bad that year. On the Sunday 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,
