More Letters of Note

by Shaun Usher

  Shelagh Delaney

  Letter No. 016

  EVERYONE IS EXPECTING ME TO DO BIG THINGS

  JACK TRICE TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  October 5th, 1923

  Jack Trice was Iowa State’s first African-American athlete. On October 6th of 1923, aged 21, he played his first major college football game in a match against the University of Minnesota: in the first half, he suffered a broken collarbone but continued to play; later in the game, he was stamped on by three players on the opposing team and suffered internal injuries that would kill him days later. Shortly before his funeral, this letter was found in his suit jacket. It had been written the night before the game, as he stayed in a different hotel to his teammates due to his being black.

  Oct 5, 1923

  To whom it may concern:-

  My thoughts just before the first real college game of my life. The honor of my race, family, and self are at stake. Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will! My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about on the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped I will be trying to do more than my part.

  On all defensive plays I must break through the opponent’s line and stop the play in their territory. Beware of mass interference, fight low with your eyes open and toward the play. Roll block the interference. Watch out for cross bucks and reverse end runs. Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good.

  (meeting) 7:45

  Jack

  Letter No. 017

  WITH GREAT RESPECT, MARGE SIMPSON

  MARGE SIMPSON TO BARBARA BUSH

  September 28th, 1990

  First Lady Barbara Bush received a letter from the unlikeliest of sources in 1990, as a result of an article in People magazine in which she described The Simpsons as being “the dumbest thing [she] had ever seen”. She couldn’t have imagined that such a quote would elicit a response from the cartoon family itself, but it did, in the form of a reply from Marge Simpson that soon arrived at the White House. An apologetic letter from Barbara Bush followed.

  Tensions between the two families resurfaced two years later, when Barbara’s husband, then-US President George H. W. Bush, promised: “We’re going to keep trying to strengthen the American family. To make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.” The next episode of The Simpsons featured an amended opening sequence in which, after watching Bush’s speech on television, Bart responded: “Hey, we’re just like the Waltons. We’re praying for an end to the Depression too.”

  THE SIMPSONS™

  September 28, 1990

  Mrs. Barbara Bush

  The First Lady

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

  Washington, D.C.

  Dear First Lady:

  I recently read your criticism of my family. I was deeply hurt. Heaven knows we’re far from perfect and, if truth be known, maybe just a wee bit short of normal; but as Dr. Seuss says, “a person is a person”.

  I try to teach my children Bart, Lisa, and even little Maggie, always to give somebody the benefit of the doubt and not talk badly about them, even if they’re rich. It’s hard to get them to understand this advice when the very First Lady in the country calls us not only dumb, but “the dumbest thing” she ever saw. Ma’am, if we’re the dumbest thing you ever saw, Washington must be a good deal different than what they teach me at the current events group at the church.

  I always believed in my heart that we had a great deal in common. Each of us living our lives to serve an exceptional man. I hope there is some way out of this controversy. I thought, perhaps, it would be a good start to just speak my mind.

  With great respect,

  (Signed)

  Marge Simpson

  * * *

  [Barbara Bush’s response:]

  Dear Marge,

  How kind of you to write. I’m glad you spoke your mind; I foolishly didn’t know you had one.

  I am looking at a picture of you, depicted on a plastic cup, with your blue hair filled with pink birds peeking out all over. Evidently, you and your charming family — Lisa, Homer, Bart and Maggie — are camping out. It is a nice family scene. Clearly you are setting a good example for the rest of the country.

  Please forgive a loose tongue.

  Warmly,

  Barbara Bush

  P.S. Homer looks like a handsome fella!

  Letter No. 018

  SLOWLY, QUIETLY, NEVER GIVING UP

  CARL SANDBURG TO MARGARET SANDBURG

  November 1921

  Carl Sandburg was a man of many talents. He was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet, a writer, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, a journalist, and even a folk singer. In 1907, he met Lilian Steichen and they fell deeply in love; a year later they were married, and they remained so until Sandburg’s death in 1967, at which point they had three daughters. In 1921, their eldest girl, Margaret – at ten years old already highly intelligent and something of a chip off the old block – was found to be epileptic. Soon after the diagnosis, unable to visit her at Battle Creek Sanitarium where she was being treated, Carl Sandburg wrote a short letter to his daughter and attempted to soothe her nerves.

  * * *

  November 1921

  Dear Margaret,

  This is only a little letter from your daddy to say he thinks about you hours and hours and he knows that there was never a princess or a fairy worth so much love. We are starting on a long journey and hard fight — you and mother and daddy — and we are going to go on slowly, quietly, hand in hand, the three of us, never giving up. And so we are going to win. Slowly, quietly, never giving up, we are going to win.

  Daddy

  Letter No. 019

  SHE WAS THE MUSIC HEARD FAINTLY AT THE EDGE OF SOUND

  RAYMOND CHANDLER TO LEONARD RUSSELL

  December 29th, 1954

  Celebrated detective novelist Raymond Chandler’s wife of 30 years, Cissy, died on December 12th, 1954 after a long and painful battle with pulmonary fibrosis during which the author wrote The Long Goodbye. As can be seen in this touching and affectionate letter, written to friend Leonard Russell shortly after Cissy’s passing, Raymond was deeply affected by the loss of his wife, and it seems he never really recovered. Sadly, he died five years later a broken man, having attempted suicide and returned to the alcoholism she had previously helped him to avoid.

  * * *

  December 29, 1954

  Dear Leonard:

  Your letter of December 15th has just reached me, the mails being what they are around Christmas time. I have received much sympathy and kindness and many letters, but yours is somehow unique in that it speaks of the beauty that is lost rather than condoling with the comparatively useless life that continues on. She was everything you say, and more. She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound. It was my great and now useless regret that I never wrote anything really worth her attention, no book that I could dedicate to her. I planned it. I thought of it, but I never wrote it. Perhaps I couldn’t have written it.

  She died hard. Her body fought a hundred lost battles, any one of which would have been enough to finish most of us. Twice I brought her home from the hospital because she hated hospitals, and had her in her own room with nurses around the clock. But she had to go back. And I suppose she never quite forgave me for that. But when at the end I closed her eyes she looked very young. Perhaps by now she realizes that I tried, and that I regarded the sacrifice of several years of a rather insignificant literary career as a small price to pay, if I could make her smile a few times more.

  No doubt you realize that this was no sudden thing, that it had been going on for a long time, and that I have said goodbye to my Cissy in the middle of the night in the dark cold hours many, many times. She admired and liked you very much. I’m not sure that she liked Dilys as much as I did, because possibly she suspected that I liked her too much. And it is just possible that I thought she liked yo
u a little too much.

  I hope that you are both well and prosperous and that I may have the privilege of seeing you again in the not too distant future, with or without the butler from the Ritz. And I hope I am not being too sentimental if I sign myself,

  Yours affectionately,

  [Signed]

  Letter No. 020

  I EMBRACE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART

  ALBERT CAMUS TO LOUIS GERMAIN

  November 19th, 1957

  On November 7th 1913, in French Algeria, author Albert Camus was born. The second son of Lucien and Catherine Camus, he was just 11 months old when his father was killed in action during the Battle of the Marne; his mother, partially deaf and illiterate, then raised her boys in extreme poverty with the help of his heavy-handed grandmother. It was in school that Camus shone, due in no small part to the encouragement offered by his beloved teacher, Louis Germain, a man who fostered the potential he saw and steered young Camus on a path that would eventually see him write some hugely respected, award-winning novels and essays. In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”. Shortly after the occasion, he wrote to his former teacher.

  French writer Albert Camus at his publishing firm’s office in Paris, France, 1957

  19 November 1957

  Dear Monsieur Germain,

  I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.

  But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.

  I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.

  Albert Camus

  Letter No. 021

  I HAVE RESOLVED TO ESCAPE

  WINSTON CHURCHILL TO LOUIS DE SOUZA

  December 11th, 1899

  In October 1899, 40 years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, 24-year-old Winston Churchill jumped on a ship to South Africa to work as a highly-paid war correspondent during the Second Boer War. Not long after arrival, he found himself aboard an armoured train with more than 100 British soldiers that was derailed by the Boers; his heroic efforts to clear the tracks were halted, many lost their lives. Churchill was captured and held as a prisoner of war, but not for long. On the evening of December 12th, he wrote the following letter to the Under-Secretary for War, Louis de Souza, left it beneath his pillow, scaled a wall and very politely fled, never to return. On the envelope, in Churchill’s hand, was written “p.p.c.,” which stands for “pour prendre congé,” or “to take leave”.

  State Schools Prison

  Pretoria

  Dear Mr. de Souza,

  I do not consider that your government was justified in holding me, a press correspondent and a non combatant as a prisoner, and I have consequently resolved to escape. The arrangements I have succeeded in making in conjunction with my friends outside are such as give me every confidence. But I wish in leaving you thus hastily & unceremoniously to once more place on record my appreciation of the kindness which has been shown me and the other prisoners by you, by the commandant and by Dr. Gunning and my admiration of the chivalrous and humane character of the Republican forces. My views on the general question of the war remain unchanged, but I shall always retain a feeling of high respect for the several classes of the burghers I have met and, on reaching the British lines I will set forth a truthful & impartial account of my experiences in Pretoria. In conclusion I desire to express my obligations to you, and to hope that when this most grievous and unhappy war shall have come to an end, a state of affairs may be created which shall preserve at once the national pride of the Boer and the security of the British and put a final stop to the rivalry and enmity of both races. Regretting the circumstances have not permitted me to bid you a personal farewell,

  Believe me

  Yours vy sincerely

  Winston S. Churchill

  Dec. 11th 1899

  Letter No. 022

  WITH MANY GOOD WISHES FOR OUR HOUSE

  LION FEUCHTWANGER TO THE OCCUPANT OF HIS HOUSE

  March 20th, 1935

  In January of 1933, as he toured the US giving lectures, influential German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger received word that Adolf Hitler, a man whose beliefs he had been publicly lambasting for the past decade, had risen to power back in Germany, his home and place of birth. To return now would be suicide for both him and his wife, Marta; so, rather than risk imprisonment or worse, they travelled from the US to France to live in exile while their German home was looted by Hitler’s men, their books burnt and banned. Two years later, Feuchtwanger wrote a letter to the new owner of his house and saw that it was printed in the Pariser Tageblatt, a newspaper written by and for the countless Germans exiled since the Nazi Party’s rule.

  As it happens, the Feuchtwangers never saw their home again. They lived most of their remaining years in California.

  To the occupant of my house on Mahlstrasse in Berlin

  Dear Sir,

  I do not know your name or how you came into possession of my house. I only know that two years ago the police of the Third Reich seized all my property, personal and real, and handed it over to the stock company formed by the Reich for the confiscation of the properties of political adversaries (chairman of the board: Minister Goering). I learned this through a letter from the mortgagees. They explained to me that under the laws of the Third Reich confiscations of property belonging to political opponents concern themselves only with credit balances. Although my house and my bank deposits, which had also been confiscated, greatly exceeded in value the amount of the mortgage, I would be obliged to continue the payment of interests on the mortgage, as well as my German taxes, from whatever money I might earn abroad. Be that as it may, one thing is certain – you, Mr. X, are occupying my house and I, in the opinion of the German judges, must pay the costs.

  How do you like my house, Mr. X? Do you find it pleasant to live in? Did the silver-grey carpeting in the upper rooms suffer while the SA-men were looting? My concierge sought safety in these upper rooms, as, I being in America at the time, the gentlemen had decided to take it out on him. The carpet is very delicate, and red is a strong color, hard to clean out. The rubber tiling in the stairway was also not primarily designed with the boots of SA-men in mind. Should it have suffered too badly, I recommend you contact the Baake company; the flooring is the same as on the staircases of the “Europa” and the “Bremen”, and this is the company which delivered it.

  Have you any notion why I had the semi-enclosed roof terrace built? Mrs. Feuchtwanger and I used it for our morning exercise. Would you mind seeing to it that the pipes of the shower don’t freeze?

  I wonder to what use you have put the two rooms which formerly contained my library. I have been told, Mr. X, that books are not very popular in the Reich in which you live, and whoever shows interest in them is likely to get into difficulties. I, for instance, read your “Führer’s” book and guilelessly remarked that his 140,000 words were 140,000 offenses against the spirit of the German language. The result of this remark is that you are now living in my house. Sometimes I wonder to what uses bookcases can be put in the Third Reich. In case you should decide to have them ripped out, be careful not to damage the wall. And did they rip out the round bench which was built into the library’s window loggia? One thing is for certain, Mr. X, there is a lot to rebuild and repair in the house. May I suggest you contact the ar
chitect Slobotka for this purpose? I doubt whether this gentleman is allowed to practice in Berlin though since there aren’t many architects who know how to build in the city, yet there are many party members who want to build. Please, your connections permitting, do not hire a party member but rather a professional. It would be a pity about the house.

  I would like to know what is going on with the buzz saw in the Grunewald forestry. Its noise has sometimes spoiled my enjoyment of the house, and it was only with great effort that I managed to achieve the removal of this nuisance. These days of course, noise will hardly be considered a disturbance in Berlin. However, it would be nice of you if you didn’t simply give up my hard won victory.

  And what have you done with my terrarium which stood at one of the windows of my study? Did they actually kill my turtles and my lizards because their owner was of an “alien race”? And were the flower beds and the rock garden much damaged when the SA-men, shooting as they ran, pursued my sorely beaten concierge across the garden while he fled into the woods?

  Doesn’t it sometimes seem odd to you that you should be living in my house? Your “Führer” is not generally considered a friend of Jewish literature. Isn’t it, therefore, astounding that he should have such a strong predilection for the Old Testament? I myself have heard him quote with much fervor, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ (by which he may have meant ‘A confiscation of property for literary criticism’). And now, through you, he has fulfilled a prophecy of the Old Testament – the saying, ‘Thou shalt dwell in houses thou hast not builded.’