by Shaun Usher
Charles Lamb
N.B.--What is good for a desperate headache? Why, patience, and a determination not to mind being miserable all day long. And that I have made my mind up to. So, here goes. It is better than not being alive at all, which I might have been, had your man toppled me down at Lieut. Barker’s Coal-shed. My sister sends her sober compliments to Mrs. A. She is not much the worse.
Yours Truly,
C. Lamb
Letter No. 094
I DO NOT LIKE SCOLDING PEOPLE
KATHERINE MANSFIELD TO ELIZABETH BIBESCO
March 24th, 1921
Author Katherine Mansfield and editor John Middleton Murry met in 1911 and had a turbulent relationship by anyone’s standards: by the time they wed in 1918, they had split several times and seen other people; indeed, the pattern continued throughout their marriage. Three years after marrying, Mansfield wrote a stern letter to fellow author Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, a woman who for some time had been having an affair with Murry. Mansfield could deal with the infidelity; what she couldn’t stand, however, were the love letters.
Writer Katherine Mansfield
24 March, 1921
Dear Princess Bibesco,
I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world.
You are very young. Won’t you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation.
Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.
Yours sincerely,
Katherine Mansfield
Letter No. 095
MAKE YOUR SOUL GROW
KURT VONNEGUT TO XAVIER HIGH SCHOOL
November 5th, 2006
In 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City were given an assignment by their English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, that was to test their persuasive writing skills: they were asked to write to their favourite author and ask him or her to visit the school. It’s a measure of his ongoing influence that five of those pupils chose Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist responsible for, amongst other highly-respected books, Slaughterhouse-Five; sadly, however, he never made that trip. Instead, he wrote a wonderful letter. He was the only author to reply.
November 5, 2006
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter No. 096
THERE ARE NO REAL REWARDS FOR TIME PASSING
MARTHA GELLHORN TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY
June 28th, 1943
Martha Gellhorn is one of the most respected war correspondents ever known, having covered everything from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s through to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. It was at the beginning of her remarkable 60-year career, in 1936, that she met novelist Ernest Hemingway, and by 1940 they were married; however, they spent much of their four-year marriage apart with Hemingway keen to stay at home working on his novel and Gellhorn desperate to travel to and report from whichever warzone was within reach. Naturally, during such times they kept in touch by letter. In June 1943, miles apart, Gellhorn, restless, wrote to Hemingway and spoke of her fear of growing old.
American novelist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, 1946
June 28 1943
Bug my dearest:
How I long for you now. My cats are very good to me but fortunately or unfortunately they can neither read nor speak. I say to them: is it a good book; and they chase-chase over the table and roll with the electric wire and Friendless, with her dynamo purr, sits briefly on my lap.
I am enjoying Alicia who does the typing. She is surely the most unicellular female I have ever had dealings with. Today she said, ‘Martha I hate men.’ I believe it too: the way labor hates capital. She finds my books ‘absorbing’; she loves Marc’s ‘reactions.’ How odd it all is; how odd is life. Who ever would have thought that I, who started out with the dream of writing (and that dream at least never changed) and lived in a maison de passe alongside the Madeleine and romantically, self-consciously, bought a bunch of violets to wear, instead of buying breakfast, when I went looking for jobs (I was twenty), would end up here in this perfect safe beauty, finishing my fifth book. Alas. I do not want to grow old; not even if I write so much better, know more, and have an enviable instead of a rather shoddy uncertain life that only my posturing could dignify. I do not want to grow old at all. I want it so little that I would trade that wretched first book, right now, for this perhaps excellent fifth one: to have, included in the exchange, the fear and the surprise and the hope of twenty.
There are no real rewards for time passing. And I was not beautiful when I was young and no one said so and I never found myself so; and God knows it was a mean row to hoe. I have so much now that it startles me: blessings overflowing, and I had nothing then. But I don’t really like what I know; I don’t really care for wisdom and experience. I would rather believe, and beat out my brains, and believe some more. I do not like this safe, well-armed woman I have become. The loud bleating disheveled starry reckless failed girl was a better person.
I wish we could stop it all now, the prestige, the possessions, the position, the knowledge, the victory: and that we could by a miracle return together under the arch at Milan, with you so brash in your motorcycle sidecar and I, badly dressed, fierce, loving, standing in the street waiting for your picture to be taken. My God, how I wish it. I would give every single thing there now is to be young and poor with you, as poor as there was to be, and the days hard but always with that shine on them that came of not being sure, of hoping, of believing in fact in just the things we now so richly have. Well, shit I am a fool.
Where was I? I’ve had dinner now. I write the best letters and the worst books at night. Or maybe you don’t think so? Perhaps, and very naturally, you would prefer the morning letters, the cheerful known thing. I am not cheerful and I never was, I have none of that truly inside me. But much practise and much fear have taught me how to hide, so I seem just about as comfortably unconscious as the next one. Only it’s not true and I despise unconsciousness: I want life intense whether it’s good or bad, but I never want it more than intense. I want to know it’s happening, every minute of it.
Marriage is a rare thing, since it happens everywhere in nature and always has, since it is more an instinct than otherwise, it must be good. But it is a brutalization too. You’ve been married so much and so long that I do not really be
lieve it can touch you where you live. That’s your strength. It would be terrible if it did, since what you are is very much more important than the women you happen to be married to, and certainly more important than this institutionalized instinct. But it is an odd performance. One is safe: two people live together and know they will find each other at certain hours within some kind of walls. And slowly, for each other, they become the common denominator: they agree without words to lay off the fantasy and passion, the difficult personal private stuff: they find some common ground, which is green and smooth, and there they stay. And they may be quite odd and burning sort of people: like all the fancy ones of legend; Icarus and Prometheus and Leda and who else: but they are two people who have agreed to polish all the edges and keep their voice low and live. At what moment, together, can they be as wild and as free as they really are; as they are inside themselves where they never heard of an organized society and the serene considerate practical institution of marriage.
I would like to be young and poor in Milan, and with you and not married to you. I think maybe I have always wanted to feel some way like a woman, and if I ever did it was the first winter in Madrid. There is a sort of blindness and fervor and recklessness about that sort of feeling, which one must always want. I hate being so wise and careful, so reliable, so denatured, so able to get on. Possibly why I have always been happiest at wars (and also because I have never been hit) is that war is the greatest folly of all and it permits the participants to throw away all the working paraphernalia of life, and be fools too. If that is being fools? Depends on the values I guess.
I will almost bet twenty dollars that this letter makes you angry, my Bug. Doesn’t it? What does she mean, you will say, complaining and crying for some other time, and place, and life? What the hell is the matter with that bitch: haven’t I enough problems without her? But I am no problem, Bug, never think that. I am no problem. I have a brain locked inside the skull bones, as have all, and this is my affair. I only write to you as I now tonight feel or think because why not: we cannot be so married that we cannot speak.
Marty
Letter No. 097
I AM THE DEAD ONE
SPIKE MILLIGAN TO GEORGE HARRISON
December 6th, 1983
The Beatles were huge fans of The Goon Show, the legendary comedy programme created by and starring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers, and Lennon and co. cited it as an early influence on more than one occasion. The admiration was mutual, and the friendship between guitarist George Harrison and Spike Milligan was just one of the bonds that resulted; however, much to Milligan’s annoyance, Harrison was almost impossible to get hold of by telephone – so much so that in December of 1983, he instead wrote a letter.
9 Orme Court,
LONDON. W. 2.
6th December
George Harrison Esq.,
26 Cadogan Square,
LONDON. SW1X. 0JP.
Dear George,
You once said to us - the world is full of arseholes, and I’m not one of them. I have a love for certain people and I have one for you, but by sheer lack of contact it’s running out. I phone you frequently and never get a reply. This is what you do, it’s very simple; you stand in front of a telephone and you insert your fingers in the holes and carry out a series of numbers which have been given to you. Of course, if you are rich you have two buttons, which Irishmen usually sew on their coats.
Of course, if you are extremely rich you don’t have to get in touch with anybody, and that’s what I am worried about. The funeral takes place at Golders Green Crematorium, no flowers please, just money. You will recognise me, I am the dead one.
Love, light and peace,
Spike Milligan
Letter No. 098
LIKE A TREE IN FULL BEARING
CHARLOTTE BRONTË TO W. S. WILLIAMS
December 25th, 1848
Charlotte Brontë was the eldest of the Brontë sisters, three creative English siblings born in the 19th century whose most successful novels, all three of which were published in the space of nine months, are now considered classics: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Halls. They are arguably the most famous of all literary families. In 1848, a year after the publication of her aforementioned magnum opus, Emily, the middle sister, died from tuberculosis; she was just 30 years old. A week later, Charlotte wrote to her publisher.
December 25th, 1848.
My dear Sir,—I will write to you more at length when my heart can find a little rest—now I can only thank you very briefly for your letter, which seemed to me eloquent in its sincerity.
Emily is nowhere here now, her wasted mortal remains are taken out of the house. We have laid her cherished head under the church aisle beside my mother’s, my two sisters’—dead long ago—and my poor, hapless brother’s. But a small remnant of the race is left—so my poor father thinks.
Well, the loss is ours, not hers, and some sad comfort I take, as I hear the wind blow and feel the cutting keenness of the frost, in knowing that the elements bring her no more suffering; their severity cannot reach her grave; her fever is quieted, her restlessness soothed, her deep, hollow cough is hushed for ever; we do not hear it in the night nor listen for it in the morning; we have not the conflict of the strangely strong spirit and the fragile frame before us—relentless conflict—once seen, never to be forgotten. A dreary calm reigns round us, in the midst of which we seek resignation.
My father and my sister Anne are far from well. As for me, God has hitherto most graciously sustained me; so far I have felt adequate to bear my own burden and even to offer a little help to others. I am not ill; I can get through daily duties, and do something towards keeping hope and energy alive in our mourning household. My father says to me almost hourly, “Charlotte, you must bear up, I shall sink if you fail me”; these words, you can conceive, are a stimulus to nature. The sight, too, of my sister Anne’s very still but deep sorrow wakens in me such fear for her that I dare not falter. Somebody must cheer the rest.
So I will not now ask why Emily was torn from us in the fulness of our attachment, rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers; why her existence now lies like a field of green corn trodden down, like a tree in full bearing struck at the root. I will only say, sweet is rest after labour and calm after tempest, and repeat again and again that Emily knows that now.—Yours sincerely,
C. Brontë
Letter No. 099
YOU GAVE ME A VALUABLE GIFT: YOU TOOK ME SERIOUSLY
HOWARD CRUSE TO DR. SEUSS (AND VICE VERSA)
1957 onwards
During an illustrious career that saw him win multiple awards and worldwide recognition, Theodore Geisel published over 60 books, the majority of which he wrote and illustrated under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Despite his busy schedule, and just months after the release of The Cat in the Hat, Geisel set aside time to reply with a charming letter to a 13-year-old aspiring illustrator by the name of Howard Cruse. Naturally, Cruse was delighted, and wrote again two years later; yet again, Geisel replied. Such was the positive impact on Cruse that in 1985, 26 years later, he decided to write to the author one last time and thank him for his advice all those years ago. Again, Geisel replied.
As for Howard Cruse, his award-winning graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, was published by DC Comics in 1995; a 15th anniversary edition was released in 2010.
Dr. Seuss
THE TOWER
La Jolla, California
May 12, 1957
Dear Howard:
I am very sorry to have been so long in answering your very friendly letter of April 13th. But I’ve been East. And the letter’s been waiting me here in the West.
Your theatre productions sound wonderful. And I am very proud that you dedicated it to me.. and performed so many of my stories in it.
....
About giving you advice...pointers on how to properly write and illustrate a p
icture book...all I can say is this:
This is a field in which no one can give you pointers but yourself.
The big successes in this field all succeeded because they wrote and they wrote and they drew and they drew. They studied what they’d drawn and they studied what they’d written each time asking themselves one question: How can I do it better, next time?
To develop an individual style of writing and drawing, always go to yourself for criticism. If you ask advice from too many other people, then you no longer are yourself.
The thing to do, and I am sure you will do it, is to keep up your enthusiasm! Every job is a lot of fun, no matter how much work it takes. If you’ll plug away and do exactly what you are doing, making it better and better every month and every year...that you CAN be successful.