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16 posts tagged letters
“It’s easy to be pure when you can hate the Devil you don’t know, while at the same time loving the God you lack the brains to doubt.”
“The substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism.”
“You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies…
Please read on.
(Source: Harry Ransom Center)
10-10-95
Dear Don,
Since it’s clear from your letters that you’re a person nice, and since it’s well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to afflict the congenitally nice, I again want to implore you not to feel any obligation to read the BM any…
“He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.”
Dostoevsky writing about having met Charles Dickens in London in 1862, as quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his last article for Vanity Fair.
[Edit: That very well might be spurious.]
“… the story these letters tell, inescapably, is the banal tale of the dream come true, of long labours at last rewarded. And that is one reason they make such good reading. (…) in December of [1950] he is able to tell George Reavey: ‘I have signed a contract with the Editions of Minuit for all work’ and ‘Pretty well certain now that the second play, En attendant Godot, will be put on by Blin at the Noctambules.’
In truth there would be another two frustrated years waiting for finance before Godot premiered on 5 January 1953. Anyone who has read these two volumes of letters will sense at once where the idea of the interminable wait for some life-changing encounter, ever announced, never materialising, perhaps feared as much as hoped, came from. Beckett was now 46 and had been waiting twenty years. ‘Godot himself,’ he later writes, ‘is not of a different species from those he cannot or will not help. I myself know him less well than anyone, having never known even vaguely what I needed.’ A good publisher and a fine director with adequate financial support might have been one, superficial answer to that question.”
“The little furniture of loss has lips of dirk to stab us.”
![…in which Hemingway declares his preference for marshmellow candies…
[Read the entire letter at the Paris Review.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsj4hsSIKg1qzms5to1_1280.jpg)
…in which Hemingway declares his preference for marshmellow candies…
[Read the entire letter at the Paris Review.]
Letter from T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, dated August, 1924, published in the Paris Review
“38 Burleigh Mansions, St Martins Lane, London W.C.2.
27 August 1924
My dear Virginia,
Forgive the unconscionable delay in answering your charming letter and invitation. I have been boiled in a hell-broth, and on Saturday journeyed to Liverpool to place my mother in her transatlantic, with the confusion and scurry usual on such occasions, and the usual narrow escape from being carried off to America (or at least to Cobh) myself. In the tumult on the dock an impetuous lady of middle age, ‘seeing off’ a relative going to make his fortune in the New World, by way of the Steerage) stuck her umbrella in my eye, which is Black. I should love to visit you, seriously: the Prince of Bores to refresh his reputation: but the only pleasure that I can now permit myself is, that should I come to Eastbourne (which is doubtful) we might visit you by dromedary for tea: if I leave London at all I am most unlikely to get done all the things that I ought to do (such as my 1923 Income Tax Return) and certainly not any of the things that you want me to do. I have done absolutely nothing for six weeks. One thing is certain: I MUST stay in London, where Vivien will be, after this week, is uncertain. But
When do you want to publish my defective compositions?
When do you want the MSS?
I should like at least to provide a short preface, which might take two or three nights’ work, and make a few alterations in the text to remove the more patent evidences of periodical publication. These three essays are not very good (the one on Dryden is the best) but I cannot offer you my ‘Reactionary’s Encheiridion’ or my ‘By Sleeping-Car to Rome: A Note on Church Reunion’ because they will not be ready in time. But you shall see for yourself, as soon as you wish, whether you think these three papers good enough to reprint.
But what about a FRAGMENT of an Unpublished Novel from you to me? One exists most of the time in morose discontent with the sort of work that one does oneself, and wastes vain envy on all others: the worst of it is that nobody will believe one. But no one regrets more that these moods should occur to Mrs. Woolf (of all people) than
Yr. devoted servt.
Thos. Eliot”
A love letter from Mark Twain to his wife.
“I am grateful — gratefuler than ever before — that you were born, & that your love is mine & our two lives woven & welded together!”
(From Flavorwire.)
