by Shaun Usher
The very best of luck to you!
Your friend,
[Signed]
Dr. Seuss
* * *
THE TOWER
La Jolla, California
June 12, 1959
Mr. Howard Cruse
P. O. Box 59
Springville, Alabama
Dear Mr. Cruse:
It was very pleasant to hear from you again and to learn that your excitement is just as high as ever, after two years.
I certainly think that the Famous Artists Cartoon Course will help you a lot. This is one of the few really top-drawer courses available in cartooning in the United States.
AND, if you think you cringe when you look at your scrapbook, you should see what I do. I have been just cleaning house, and almost committed suicide when I discovered my 1929 files.
Keep cringing away! The more you cringe over your old stuff, the more that means you’re going ahead!
With every best wish,
[Signed]
(DR. SEUSS)
* * *
TSG. em
January 3, 1985
Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss
The Tower
La Jolla, CA
Dear Mr. Geisel/Dr. Seuss,
If you peer at the two Xerox copies which are attached to this letter, you’ll recognize them as your gracious responses to a thirteen/fifteen-year-old Alabama boy who wrote to you in 1957 and 1959. I told you about the puppet-show adaptations of Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and McElligot’s Pool which I wrote and performed for neighborhood kids in my basement, and I confided that I hoped to grow up and write and illustrate children’s books myself. As you can see, you gave me a valuable gift: you took me seriously.
It’s been twenty-five years since the second of your two letters to me was written. During that time, I’ve often thought that I should write and thank you for the encouraging words which you offered me. On my fortieth birthday last May, I was given (at my request) The Butter Battle Book. I enjoyed seeing the world through your eyes again as much as I did when I was very young, and I appreciate your willingness to engage a truly serious and important subject within the children’s book format.
I have not illustrated any children’s books yet, but I have grown-up to be a cartoonist and humorous illustrator. My principal interest is in comic strips for adults, and I fill out my extra time doing spot drawings for magazines. My first book – a trade paperback collection of my comic strip Wendel – will be published at the end of 1985.
Although I couldn’t claim to enjoy a hundredth of your own stature as an artist, I occasionally receive letters from youngsters not unlike the letters I wrote to you. And remembering the strength of the childhood dreams which are represented by such letters, I try very hard to do as you did and treat the young artist as a person with dignity. Thanks for showing me, in your work all through the years as well as in the particular letters you wrote to me, both how to be a wonderful artist and how to be a kind and supportive human being.
Yours sincerely,
Howard Cruse
* * *
Dear Howard......
It sure made me feel GOOD, reading your letter and seeing what you’ve been accomplishing during the past 25 years! It makes me especially happy to have played a small part in it.
May your first book, WENDEL, sell a billion copies. And may your next 25 years be even better than the 25 you’ve just conquered!
All the best
Dr. Seuss
Letter No. 100
THE MISERABLE’S NAME IS MAN
VICTOR HUGO TO M. DAELLI
October 18th, 1862
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is arguably one of the best-known novels of all time. Initially published in French in 1862, it tells the story of Jean Valjean, a prisoner of 19 years who, upon release, breaks parole in an attempt to rebuild his life and finds himself caring for a young girl who has turned to prostitution to support herself and her daughter – a situation further complicated by the fact that he is being doggedly pursued by a detective keen to return him to prison. The book has since been translated into every language imaginable, has graced countless “Best of” lists, and has been adapted for film, theatre and radio many times over – thanks, in no small part, to the universal themes at its core: redemption, love, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Very soon after its publication, Victor Hugo expanded on this very point by way of a letter written to M. Daelli, the publisher responsible for the novel’s Italian translation.
French writer Victor Marie Hugo, c. 1870
HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.
You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Miserables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: “Open to me, I come for you.”
At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable’s name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.
Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.
Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.
Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization acknowledges?
Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured s prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? Wha
t is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserables.
From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.
I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book, – I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.
As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more, human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.
Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.
In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what they call “French taste”; I should be glad if this eulogium were merited.
In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: “Help me!”
This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one phrase in your letter. You write: –
“There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: ‘This book, Les Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance.’” – Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.
If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished sentiments.
VICTOR HUGO
Letter No. 101
WE WERE NOT FOUND WANTING
CHARLES JACK PRICE TO HIS STAFF
November 27th, 1963
On November 22nd of 1963, as he travelled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was killed by the two bullets of a sniper hiding on the sixth floor of a nearby building; one of Kennedy’s travelling companions, Governor of Texas Jack Connally, was also injured. Five days later, Charles Jack Price, then-Administrator of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, proudly sent a memo to all staff and made clear his appreciation for their professional conduct over the past week – a period during which, as the world’s population looked on in abject horror, the hospital had dealt with the deaths of two people in particular on its premises: John F. Kennedy, and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
DALLAS COUNTY HOSPITAL DISTRICT
Office Memorandum
November 27, 1963
To: All Employees
At 12:38 p.m., Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy and Texas’ Governor John Connally were brought to the Emergency Room of Parkland Memorial Hospital after being struck down by the bullets of an assassin.
At 1:07 p.m., Sunday, November 24, 1963, Lee. H. Oswald, accused assassin of the late president, died in an operating room of Parkland Memorial Hospital after being shot by a bystander in the basement of Dallas’ City Hall. In the intervening 48 hours and 31 minutes Parkland Memorial Hospital had:
Become the temporary seat of the government of the United States.
Become the temporary seat of the government of the State of Texas.
Become the site of the death of the 35th President.
Become the site of the ascendency of the 36th President.
Become site of the death of President Kennedy’s accused assassin.
Twice become the center of the attention of the world.
Continued to function at close to normal pace as a large charity hospital.
What is it that enables an institution to take in stride such a series of history jolting events? Spirit? Dedication? Preparedness? Certainly, all of these are important, but the underlying factor is people. People whose education and training is sound. People whose judgement is calm and perceptive. People whose actions are deliberate and definitive. Our pride is not that we were swept up by the whirlwind of tragic history, but that when we were, we were not found wanting.
(Signed)
C. J. Price
Administrator
Letter No. 102
SHEER ENCHANTMENT
SOPHIE SCHOLL TO LISA REMPPIS
February 17th, 1943
Sophie Scholl was 22 years old when she wrote this optimistic letter to her friend, Lisa Remppis, and spoke of soon enjoying the spring. Sadly, the next day Sophie and her brother, Hans – both members of the White Rose, a non-violent group of students who actively opposed Hitler’s regime by circulating anti-Nazi leaflets – were arrested at Munich University for handing out another batch to passers-by. Within just a week they had been convicted of treason; a few hours later they were beheaded by guillotine.
* * *
Dear Lisa,
I’ve just been playing the Trout Quintet on the phonograph. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can’t help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad at heart you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky and the budding branches sway, stirred by the wind, in the bright young sunlight. I’m so much looking forward to the spring again. In that piece of Schubert’s you can positively feel and smell the breezes and scents and hear the birds and the whole of creation cry out for joy. And when the piano repeats the theme like cool, clear, sparkling water – oh, it’s sheer enchantment.
Let me hear from you soon.
Lots of love,
Sophie
Letter No. 103
I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT
BARNUM BROWN TO PROFESSOR OSBORN
August 12th, 1902
Born in Kansas in 1873, Barnum Brown was the “Indiana Jones of Paleontology” – a charismatic character who travelled the world hunting for the fossils of dinosaurs, and with great success. In August of 1902, whilst leading an expedition at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, Brown wrote this letter to the museum’s president, Professor Osborn. and spoke of, amongst other things, a collection of bones found in a small quarry, saying “I have never seen any thing like it from the Cretaceous.” This was in fact the most famous discovery he would ever make, for he had actually found the first ever partial skeleton of the mighty Tyrannosaur
us rex. Or so he thought. It later transpired that Brown had already discovered a Tyrannosaurus rex in 1900; he uncovered five in total during his incredible career.
Camp on Hell Creek,
Aug 12th 1902
My Dear Prof. Osborn:-
Your letter of July 20th received. I was greatly disappointed to hear that the Claosaurus turned out so poorly especially after all the labor and expense of getting it. I bared bones all over the blocks so that it would have been necessary to take out all the bones from the matrix in the field to determine what condition they were in while the femur ilium and pubis which lay in soft sand were in good state of preservation.
I greatly appreciate your criticism and every pound of matrix that we can possibly remove from these specimens will come off though it takes a great deal of valuable time from prospecting.
Quarry No 2 which contained Triceratops sacrum, scapula, humerus, ulna pubis vertebrae and ribs has been worked out and one load taken to Miles.
Quarry No 1 contains the femur, pubes, part of humerus, three vertebrae and two undetermined bones of a large Carnivorous Dinosaur not described by Marsh. The pubes are about five feet long. I have never seen any thing like it from the Cretaceous. These bones are embedded in flint-like blue sandstone concretions and require a great deal of labor to extricate.
I am now working out Sterrholophus skull which is a prize. Associated with skull are humerus, lower jaw, four phalanges fibula, tibia and frags.Part of these bones are in bad condition and in previous letter I described condition of skull. Prof Lull or I will go in with skull to insure its safety next week when Brooks leaves us. Brooks has been with us a little over a month, a fine fellow in camp and has proven useful in our work.I have received from the Museum five hundred dollars and have spent five hundred and seventy five dollars plus some small accounts not in yet not counting Prof Lull’s salary.I purchased three good horses, a new wagon and camp equipage which will sell for nearly full value, about two hundred and seventy five dollars.