The “begging letter,” when written with enough sincere chagrin and charm, may end up seeming as much a present, a kind of prefacto thank-you note, as a request. Indeed, the “bread-and-butter letter,” which appreciative houseguests are supposed to send to their hosts the day after arriving home, seems with its curious name to show the codependence of supplication and gratitude. But there are those begging letters that spring from calculated greed, ones that exchange the downcast eye of embarrassment for a cunning tug of the forelock in order to make an entirely false confession of need. This variety of the letter survives even today in the sudden appearance, usually from overseas, of e-mailed opportunities to relieve a person’s medical desperation through the simple act of providing one’s bank account number. But the genre’s low-tech traditions go back centuries. Here, from The New York Times of March 29, 1901, is an explanation for the arrest of the entire Patrick McCann family of East Forty-sixth Street:
The scheme of the letters was for the woman to represent herself as a former servant of some rich person, in dire distress through sickness and to appeal for a contribution of $5 or $10 to help through pressing emergencies. Such a study the woman made of the system … that she read all the society announcements in the various newspapers in order to secure the names of fresh victims. The plan then was … for the woman to seek Mrs. Francis, the janitress of her house, and have her write the appealing letter, telling of an old servant about to be dispossessed, and then have one of the children present it at the house of the person to be swindled.
The Dickensian feel of this reconstruction reminds us of how, throughout his fame as an author, Dickens himself, that champion of the imprisoned debtor, received bagfuls of letters requesting his help and his cash. In the mid-1840s, he went so far as to report one schemer named John Walker to the Mendicity Society, whose very name Dickens would seem to have invented. But it was the mendacity, not the mendicity, that troubled the novelist. In an article for Household Words, Dickens wrote of his exasperation with the way the writers of begging letters were “dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us.”
The crook Dickens typically hears from has, at various times, “wanted a great coat, to go to India in; a pound, to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots, to take him to the coast of China; a hat, to get him into a permanent situation under Government.” Dickens sometimes detects the pseudo-desperate writer “fuming his letters with tobacco smoke”—perhaps garlic, too—while he’s in the midst of threatening suicide and assuring the recipient that he has never written this sort of thing before. The letters usually come via a messenger, often a child, who will later graduate to practicing the profession himself.
The cheap chiseling drives Dickens to a rhetorical scorn that he normally reserves for industrial-scale malefactors like Mr. Bounderby. Indeed, it says something, as the critic Michael Slater reminds us, that the novelist picks begging-letter authorship as the epilogic fate of Pecksniff, one of his pettiest, nastiest and most memorable villains. The actual poor, Dickens insists, “never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike their habits.”
BY THE MID-1980S, William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) looked less like the “connoisseur of horror” he once called himself, than someone’s terribly frail grandfather, so stooped and skinny one could almost see his ribs through the back of his sport coat. That he lived for another decade, long enough to see the publication of his letters, seems a sort of medical mystery to their reader, who gets to follow Burroughs through the fifteen years of struggle that preceded the success of Naked Lunch, a time of solitary wandering and gluttonous drug-taking.
“I have given up junk entirely and don’t miss it at all.” These famous last words, written in 1946, are among the volume’s first: the thirty-two-year-old Burroughs is spending a court-ordered summer with his parents after a narcotics arrest. As the next dozen years go by and the family’s black sheep moves from growing vegetables in Louisiana to getting high in Colombia and on to buying boys and drugs in Tangiers, the reader almost requires a Burroughs calculator, source of the family fortune, to count Bill’s climbings onto and off the junk wagon.
Dope proves a distraction from his farming (“Putting out feelers in the local junk market”), and Burroughs ends up being one of the few men who can say their rehab was thwarted by dislocations to the agricultural economy: “I had hoped to go to a sanatorium for a 10 day cure on my carrot money. Now that hope is blasted.” On New Year’s Day 1950 he writes Jack Kerouac to praise a lack of Mexican effort at “curtailing self-medication. Needles and syringes can be bought anywhere.” By March of ‘51, he’s taken “the Chinese cure and [is] off the junk,” but thirteen months later, with the departure of a lover, he’s “got another habit. Start cutting down tomorrow.”
It goes on like this, year after year, from codeine to Eukodol, Peru to Morocco, in and out of “the straitjacket of junk,” crawling between resolute cleanness and “[d]egenerate spectacle: I just hit a vein (not easy these days. I don’t got many veins left). So I kissed the vein, calling it ‘my sweet little needle sucker,’ and talked baby talk to it.”
Even so, Burroughs slogs through the cycles of kicking and lapsing and kicking and lapsing with more plainspokenness than the average social drinker manages to summon. Whether he’s writing about the Texas drug laws (“For some idiotic reason the bureaucrats are more opposed to tea than to stuff”) or making fun of Allen Ginsberg’s short-lived “normalization program,” by which the younger writer hopes to turn heterosexual, Burroughs somehow keeps a perspicacious head above the ocean of dope. Even while he wallows in Tangier, a sort of peripheral vision permits him to see the city for what it is: “Things here are so typically Tangiers—‘My dear, anything can happen in Tangiers’—that it is positively sick-making.”
Between hallucinations he is more than ordinarily respectful of common reality, going so far, in 1948, as to pronounce a philosophy of “factualism”: “All arguments, all nonsensical considerations as to what people ‘should do,’ are irrelevant. Ultimately there is only fact on all levels, and the more one argues, verbalizes, moralizes the less he will see and feel of fact. Needless to say, I will not write any formal statement on the subject. Talk is incompatible with factualism.” He means for his early writings, such as Junky, to carry no message beyond mere descriptiveness (“You might say it was a travel book more than anything else”). He writes mostly to stave off misery, though he prefers contracts and royalties to neglect and persecution. A good deal of what’s in his letters ends up, sometimes word for word, in the novels he eventually publishes, and amid all the paranoid phantasmagoria those books contain, one can still detect a nod and a wink, the sly self-awareness of “That Junky writin’ boy Bill,” as he signs himself to Ginsberg in 1952.
American conservatism is hardly a seamless garment, and the question of drug legalization has always strained its libertarian lining. But Burroughs, no single-issue deregulator, can be found wearing the cloak with surprising frequency. In 1949, when renting the back house on his Louisiana property, he tells Kerouac of a dismaying discovery that he cannot evict his tenants “without removing the premises from the rental market. I tell you we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism.” All liberals, he writes a few months later, are “vindictive, mean and petty,” and when he heads for Mexico City on the GI Bill he delivers a word of advice: “I always say keep your snout in the public trough.” Burroughs is frequently one step ahead of the local police, but the totalitarianism he fears is of the looming nanny-state variety. “Why can’t people mind their own fucking business?” is his motto. Ginsberg, his intellectual foil for some of these libertarian pronouncements, thinks Burroughs’s “b.s. about Statism and Cops and welfare state is just a W. C. Fields act,” but there is a bit more to it than that: “There are 2 bases for any ethical system,” Burroughs declare
s to him in 1950. “(1) Aristocratic code (2) Religion.”
That he is prepared to embrace neither doesn’t keep him from being a kind of ethicist to the Beats. He recognizes Neal Cassady as an “inveterate moocher” and offers Ginsberg this moral evaluation of the cross-country trip Kerouac would turn into On the Road: “I can not forgo a few comments on the respective and comparative behavior of the several individuals comprising the tour, a voyage which for sheer compulsive pointlessness compares favorably with the mass migrations of the Mayans.” Ginsberg himself needs few lectures in behavior. The letters provide consistent evidence of the poet’s loyalty, patience and simple niceness to Burroughs, whom he serves diligently, and for a time quite hopelessly, as a literary agent.
Burroughs often lets his own letters simmer “on the stove” for days on end; their composition betrays more shaping than haste. In them he stages some of the vaudeville vignettes that dapple his novels, and he indulges in that fifties specialty, the sick joke: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” He can mix hipster riffs, camp and Papa Hemingway’s Injun talk in a single letter, but he’s at his best when playing it starkly straight. His high-speed photos of Peru have a terrible vividness: “Lima, a city of open spaces, shit strewn lots and huge parks, vultures wheeling in a violet sky and young kids spitting blood in the street.”
Burroughs was of course a gun nut, thanks to that aggressive sense of personal liberty and who knows what dope-soaked collision between the sexual and death-seeking urges. He famously killed his common-law wife, Joan, in a drunken game of William Tell that the two of them enacted with a gun and a glass. His literary exploitation of the incident is less repellent than his effort, a few years later, to explain it to Ginsberg. “May yet attempt a story or some account of Joan’s death. I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it. I think I am afraid. Not exactly to discover unconscious intent. It’s more complex, more basic and more horrible, as if the brain drew the bullet toward it.” He knew that a passage like this might eventually be read by more eyes than Ginsberg’s. “Better save my letters,” he’d written him three years earlier. “[M]aybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” Eventually he had one, and his letters by and large confirm it. But it is a reputation for talent, not genius, and so the lines above must stand pretty loathsomely amid all the grubby levelheadedness surrounding them. Genius may have its license, but talent is too common to be the basis for forgiveness, at least on the scale he required it.
VIOLENCE—AGAINST EITHER the superfamous recipient or the desperately obscure sender—never seems far from the extreme fan letter, the kind that confesses not a burst of infatuation but grinding obsession. During the 1980s, two rock ‘n’ roll chroniclers named Fred and Judy Vermorel “read about 40,000 letters” written to British pop idols before offering a sample of them in an anthology called Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans. The ghost of John Len non and the gun of Mark David Chapman hover over the whole production.
The lonely devotion of “Cosima” to David Bowie (“please don’t think I am crazy”) is such that “every time people say bad things about you I feel the duty to defend you and sometimes I become violent.” Cosima begs Bowie to understand that he is her “central life” and “the only human being for who I would be capable to do sacrifice.” Of whom it is not entirely clear. One fan of Nick Heyward tells him that “It deeply disturbs me knowing you will never belong to me,” while another explains that she has considered falling into a coma in order to get his attention.
CIA interception of these letters is sometimes feared by those who write them, and another of Bowie’s fans, “Heather,” suspects that the rock star is tapping her family phone. And yet, amid the threats and paranoia, one occasionally finds, especially in the closings, a peculiar sweetness. “Melanie” is startled to realize that she may have begun to feel Bowie’s loneliness along with her own: “I am your friend, David. Feel free to push unmanageable emotions in my direction.”
With more typical anger, however, “Cheryl” warns Nick Heyward that she “never got on well writing a diary because I couldn’t communicate with a blank piece of paper,” and if he thinks he can get away without responding to her letters, he’s “got another think coming—what a nerve.” Even unanswered, these letters have a usefulness to their writers beyond anything the diary’s blank brick wall can afford. They entail a physical transmission, a penetration of the beloved’s space, if only just his outer office; they offer themselves to be ripped open or flung into the trash, a fate that Cheryl imagines and protests even as some masochistic part of her is relishing the negative attention.
The Who’s Pete Townshend, in an introduction to the Vermorels’ anthology, admitted to being a bit scared by some of the letters he himself had received over the years, but he concluded that the writing of them is part of an understandable, if displaced, search for God: “what matters is that I have made myself available as what Jung called a symbol of ‘transformation.’”
WHICH BRINGS US TO the most famous mail ever to pass between Vienna and Zurich.
“We must never let our poor neurotics drive us crazy,” writes Dr. Sigmund Freud to Dr. Carl Gustav Jung on New Year’s Eve, 1911. The revelations, humbling but healing, that Freud and his acolyte are in the midst of bringing to the human psyche result, the men’s letters make clear, only from long, daily, tricky labor. Misapprehension and overwork are prominent themes of the correspondence conducted by mentor and disciple between 1906 and 1914. Jung is “swamped” by his practice and Freud “enslaved” by his, enough so that the toil threatens the latter’s “so-called health.” But if the therapeutic truth is to spread beyond the consulting rooms of central Europe, there are journals to edit, conferences to convene, converts to make and dissenters to punish. The letters shuttle back and forth like some great clerical superego, keeping everything organized.
Even in the years of Jung’s fealty toward Freud, cracks are visible in their professional alliance and personal devotion. Freud, after all, scorns those who suspect a physiological cause of mental illness (“they are still waiting for the discovery of the bacillus or protozoon of hysteria”), leaving the more curious Jung to apologize at one point for having resorted to “a wee bit of biology” in explaining the libido. Before fully embarking on the expeditions that will make him see the unconscious as more than sexual and even collective in its nature, Jung tends to report any deviation from Freud’s still-new orthodoxies with a certain embarrassment: “I have been dabbling in spookery again,” he writes on November 2, 1907. Freud pronounces the occult “a charming delusion,” and the younger man promises to be “careful” in his exploration of its precincts. By 1911, when considering astrology and mythology, Jung still seems bent on convincing himself that he intends no more than a temporary detour from the Freudian fold. He begs Freud for a bit of time: “Please don’t worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes. I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche.”
Freud will, of course, make his own investigations of mythology but continue to believe that it “in all likelihood … centres on the same nuclear complex as the neuroses.” Whereas Jung would like to see Christianity regain the mythic symbols and joy it once contained, the home office in Vienna regards religion as the immature manifestation of a helpless, psychosexual need. Freud calls his own view of the matter “very banal,” but he doesn’t retract it: “After infancy [man] cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for himself a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.”
In his association with Jung, Freud craves not a parent but a son, someone more intimately bound to him than a mere trained successor. As for God: Freud can fill that role himself. Jung, at the start, is conveniently subservient, prone in fact to slavish expressions of admiration and loyalty. Early in 1908, he
asks Freud “to let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of father and son.” Freud admits that he likes being in the right and throughout the correspondence is always delighted by signs of submission: “I was overjoyed at your interest in Leonardo [Freud’s essay on da Vinci] and at your saying that you were coming closer to my way of thinking.” Jung owns up to a “father complex,” which Freud tends to notice only when the condition is prompting resistance by the son. Jung stages small rebellions followed by wholesale surrenders. In April 1909, after some disagreement over his interest in poltergeists, the younger man fancies that the dispute has “freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority,” but a year later he’s once again asking that Freud “forgive me all my misdemeanours.”
After their first face-to-face meeting in 1907, Jung had written to Freud less like a colleague than a patient engaged in transference: “I have the feeling of having made considerable inner progress since I got to know you personally; it seems to me that one can never quite understand your science unless one knows you in the flesh.” Freud’s own imagery for the relationship during this early period is sexual and Eucharistic: “when you have injected your own personal leaven into the fermenting mass of my ideas in still more generous measure, there will be no further difference between your achievement and mine.” He even realizes that Jung’s birthday is the same as his wife’s.
Jung confesses that his “veneration” of Freud has “something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush” with an “undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped.” However startling this revelation, it occupies a less crucial position in the letters than an exchange concerning Jung’s first patient, a “hysteric” Russian émigré named Sabina Spielrein, with whom Jung came to have a sexual relationship. By 1909, Spielrein is making trouble, causing Jung to write this half-candid, and quite put-upon, confession to Freud:
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