More Letters of Note

by Shaun Usher

  The poetically beautiful and touching performance of a great visiting artist, Vivien Leigh, has dominated the picture and given it a stature which surpasses that of the play. A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the truly great American films and one of the very few really moral films that have come out of Hollywood. To mutilate it, now, by forcing, or attempting to force, disastrous alterations in the essential truth of it would serve no good end that I can imagine.

  Please remember, also, that we have already made great concessions which we felt were dangerous to attitudes which we thought were narrow. In the middle of preparations for a new play, on which I have been working for two years, I came out to Hollywood to re-write certain sequences to suit the demands of your office. No one involved in this screen production has failed in any respect to show you the cooperation, and even deference, that has been called for. But now we are fighting for what we think is the heart of the play, and when we have our backs against the wall - if we are forced into that position - none of us is going to throw in the towel! We will use every legitimate means that any of us has at his or her disposal to protect the things in this film which we think cannot be sacrificed, since we feel that it contains some very important truths about the world we live in.

  Sincerely,

  Tennessee Williams

  Letter No. 108

  I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU YOUR OWN HISTORY

  JUAN GELMAN TO HIS GRANDCHILD

  1995

  In 1976, shortly after a coup that saw the President of Argentina, Isabel Martínez de Perón, replaced by a military dictatorship, the life of celebrated Argentine poet Juan Gelman darkened immeasurably when his son and daughter-in-law – Marcelo, 20, and María Claudia, an 18-year-old expectant mother – were kidnapped, just two of approximately 30,000 people to go missing in similar circumstances under the new regime. Gelman’s subsequent investigations confirmed the worst, that both had been killed, but also that their baby had survived and had been taken in by foster parents in Uruguay. Gelman was desperate to meet his grandchild: this letter, written in 1995 and published in a national newspaper, was the height of his search.

  Juan Gelman’s granddaughter, Macarena, was found in 1999. They met for the first time the next year. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights later forced Uruguay to admit publicly the crimes against Maria, Marcelo and Macarena Gelman. The accompanying photo shows Macarena and Juan Gelman in 2012 after Uruguayan Prime Minister Jose Mujica read a statement to this effect.

  Argentinean poet Juan Gelman kisses his granddaughter Macarena Gelman, 2012

  An Open Letter to My Grandson or Granddaughter

  Within the next six months you will turn nineteen. You would have been born one day in October 1976 in an army concentration camp, El Pozo de Quilmes, almost certainly. A little before or a little after they assassinated your father with a shot in the head from less than a half meter’s distance. He was helpless and a military detail assassinated him, perhaps the same one that kidnapped him along with your mother in Buenos Aires that 24th of August, removing them to the concentration camp known as Automotores Orletti. It functioned right there in the neighborhood of Floresta, and the military christened it “The Garden.”

  Your father’s name as Marcelo; your mother’s, Claudia. Each was twenty years old at the time, and you were six months in your mother’s womb when this happened. They moved her – and you within her – to Quilmes when she was about to give birth. She must have given birth there under the eyes of some doctor/accomplice of the military dictatorship. They took you from her then, and you were placed – it usually happened like this – in the hands of some sterile couple, military or police force, or some judge or journalist friendly to police or military. There was a sinister waiting list in those days for each concentration camp; those entered on it would wait to be paired with a child born of those prisoners who gave birth and who, with few exceptions, were assassinated immediately afterward.

  Thirteen years have passed since the military left the government, and nothing is known of your mother. On the other hand, in a sixty-gallon oil drum which the military filled with sand and concrete and threw into the San Fernando River your father’s remains were found thirteen years after the fact. He is buried now in La Tablada. At least in his case there is that much certainty.

  It is very strange for me to be speaking of my children as your parents-who-never-were. I do not know if you are a boy or a girl. I know you were born. Father Fiorello Cavalli of the Secretariat of the Vatican State assured me of that fact in February 1978. What has been your destiny since, I ask myself. Conflicting ideas keep coming to me. On the one hand I have always found repugnant the idea of your calling “Daddy” some military or police gangster who stole you, or some friend of those who assassinated your father. On the other hand I have always wished that in whatever home you may have grown up you were well brought up and educated and loved a lot. Still, I have always thought there must be some hole, or failure in the love shown you, not so much because these parents are not your biological parents – as they say – but because they would have to have some awareness of your story and how they were involved in falsifying it. I suppose that you have been lied to a lot.

  Then, too, I have wondered all these years what I would do if you were found – whether to drag you out of the home you knew; whether to speak with your adoptive parents and establish visiting rights, always on the basis of your knowing who you were and where you came from. The dilemma came up and circled around time and time again, whenever the possibility arose that the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo had found you. I would work it out differently each time, according to your age at the moment. It would worry me that you’d be too small or not small enough to understand what had happened, to understand why your parents, whom you believed to be your parents, were not, even though you might want them to be. I was worried you would suffer a double wound that way, one that would cause structural damage to your identity as it was forming.

  But now you are big. You will be capable of understanding who you are and of deciding what do to with who you are. The Grandmothers are there with their flesh-and-blood data banks that enable them to determine with scientific precision the origins of the children of the Disappeared. Your origins.

  You are almost as old now as your parents were when they killed them, and soon you will be older than they got to be, they who have stayed twenty forever. They had dreams for you and for a world more suitable and habitable. I would like to talk to you about them and to have you tell me about yourself; to be able to recognize in you my own son and to let you find in me what I have of your father – both of us are his orphans. I would like to repair somehow this brutal severance or silence that has perpetrated the military dictatorship within the very flesh of my family. I would like to give you your own history, but not separate you from what you don’t want to separate from. You are big now, as I said.

  Marcelo and Claudia’s dreams have not yet come true. Least of all for you, who were born, and who knows where and with whom you are? Perhaps you have the gray-green eyes of my son, or the chestnut-colored eyes of his wife that had a particular shine, tender and lively both. Who knows what you are like if you are a boy? Who knows what you are like if you are a girl? Maybe you’ll be able to get yourself out of this mystery and into another one: a meeting with a grandfather who is waiting for you.

  Letter No. 109

  THIS IS QUITE TRUE

  EVELYN WAUGH TO LAURA WAUGH

  May 31st, 1942

  As World War II raged in May of 1942, three years before the publication of what has since become his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited, English author Evelyn Waugh was in fact a newly-assigned member of the British Army’s Royal Horse Guards, a cavalry regiment then stationed in south-west Scotland to which he had recently been transferred. Back home, in dire need of some light relief, his wife of five years, Laura, was steadfastly holding fort whilst just weeks away from giving birth to their fourth child, Margaret
. Entertainment soon arrived in the form of a letter from her husband in which he expertly and with pitch-perfect comic timing told the story of a tree stump on the Earl of Glasgow’s estate.

  31st May 1942

  Darling

  It was a great joy to get a letter from you. I thought you had been swallowed up in some Pixton plague.

  Do you know Ellwoods address? I wrote to him care Harper – no answer.

  Miss Cowles leaves tonight. Everyone except me will be sorry. I have had to arrange all her movements and it has been a great deal of trouble. She is a cheerful, unprincipled young woman. She wants to be made Colonel in chief of the commando so I have suggested Princess Margaret Rose instead. Bob eats out of my hand at the moment.

  So No. 3 Cmdo were very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and he said don’t spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so that it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater D.S.O. said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree. Yes, sir, 75 lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.

  And when Col. D. Slater D.S.O. had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don’t want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.

  Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. D.S. D.S.O. said you will see that tree fall flat at just that angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

  So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it 1⁄2 acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.

  And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 71⁄2 lbs not 75.

  Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.

  So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.

  This is quite true.

  E

  Letter No. 110

  I SHALL EXPECT YOU, SISTER

  CLAUDIA SEVERA TO SULPICIA LEPIDINA

  Circa AD102

  First discovered near Hadrian’s Wall in the 1970s, the Vindolanda tablets remain the oldest handwritten documents to have survived the test of time – delicate, wafer-thin sheets of wood on which the 2000-year-old everyday correspondence of families still breathes, offering invaluable insights into life in Roman Britain. Arguably the most famous of these time capsules is seen here: a letter written by Claudia Severa, wife of a fort commander, in which she invites Sulpicia Lepidina to her birthday party on the 11th September. This remarkable missive is one of the earliest examples of a woman’s handwriting in Latin. The first part was dictated; the final section is in Claudia’s hand. It now resides at the British Museum.

  Letter inviting Sulpicia Lepidina to a birthday party, Vindolanda, Britain, c.102AD

  Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him their greetings.

  I shall expect you sister. Farewell, sister my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

  Letter No. 111

  LET ME ALONE

  KATHERINE ANNE PORTER TO HART CRANE

  June 22nd, 1931

  In March of 1931, shortly before travelling to Mexico to begin work on a follow-up to his epic poem, The Bridge, Hart Crane wrote to some friends and told them that he would be spending the first week with his “old and wonderful friend”, novelist Katherine Anne Porter, who had lived there for some time. Thanks to Crane’s increasingly drunken and often violent nature, even around those that he loved, that friendship soon crumbled, and just a few months after he arrived in the country, Porter could see no other option but to rid her life of him. This calm but furious letter was her goodbye. Sadly, Crane’s descent continued apace: a year later, as he sailed back to the US with no money or creative inspiration to speak of, he took his own life by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Writer Katherine Anne Porter

  Dear Hart:

  First about the lunch. I was disappointed too, and sorry for your trouble, for it is trouble to have food for people who don’t arrive. I waited too long at the Consulate, for of course they did not have my passports ready as they promised. This was my third trip to town, and I was so anxious to have it over I just sat and waited. Then the day being spoiled anyhow, I finished up some other tiresome errands, and had barely reached home when I heard myself being called, among other items, a whore and a fancy-woman and Gene a fancy-man, so I just turned about and went in again … At other times when you were in the same state, you have mentioned my ancestry, upbringing, and habits of life in the same tone, with a peculiar insistence that grew comic, but still forced me to believe it was my existence you resented, rather than any superficial criticism such as friends make of one another.

  This is a mystery to me, but not really interesting.

  You know you have had the advantage of me, because I share the superstition of our time about the somewhat romantic irresponsibility of drunkenness, holding it a social offense to take seriously things said and done by a drunken person. Therefore I have borne to the limit of my patience with brutal behavior, shameless lying, hysterical raving, and the general sordid messiness of people who had not the courage to be as shabby as they wished when sober, for fear of consequences, but must hide behind liquor and be treated with indulgence. I have behaved badly when drunk, I know it, but never to my friends, nor they, when drunk, to me. I believe a drunken mood is as good a mirror as a sober one: your behavior to me when drunk falls too consistently into the same pattern, repeats itself too monotonously, for me to believe anything except what I do believe: that for whatever reasons, and you are welcome to any reasons you have, you bear a fixed dislike to me, of a very nasty kind. At first naturally I did not want to believe this, then it troubled me very much and I tried to get at the causes and cure them; now I merely am finished, quite, with this whole affair, and refuse to have anything more to do with it. I have lived in Greenwich Village also, as you know, but I was never involved there in such a meaningless stupid situation as this … I have no taste for melodrama, and when I fight, it must be for something better than this.

  I am by temperament no victim, and I wonder at your lack of imagination in picking on me as audience for exhibitions of this kind. I’m sorry about Peggy, but I suppose she has known persons who did not agree very well before now, and I see nothing in this to take sides about. I think that you like making mischief simply through idleness and restlessness, and you don’t feel quite alive unless you are tearing at other personalities like a monkey … Let me tell you plainly that this bores me, I see through it, and I won’t have it. I have heard the astonishing tale of your treatment of the Spanish teacher, and your gratuitous insult to poor Miss Kelly, and I am beginning to believe that a sanitarium for the mentally defective is the proper place for you. If this is true, I should be sorry at having being angry at you. But I think it is time you grew up and stopped behaving like a very degenerate adolescent. You must either learn to stand on your own feet as a responsible adult, or expect to be treated as a fool. Your emotional hysteria is not impressive, except possibly to those little hangers-on of literature who feel your tantrums are a mark of genius. To me they do not add
the least value to your poetry, and take away my last shadow of a wish to ever see you again … Let me alone. This disgusting episode has already gone too far.

  Katherine Anne

  Letter No. 112

  F**K THA POLICE

  THE FBI TO PRIORITY RECORDS

  August 1st, 1989

  Straight Outta Compton, the pioneering debut album from rap group N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitude), remains to this day one of the most controversial records ever to have been recorded thanks to its explicit lyrics, misogyny, glorification of violence, and one song in particular: “Fuck tha Police”. The release of such a record just a few years before the L.A. riots, at a time when tensions were already running high between the police and the black community, resulted in its being banned by most radio stations and the cancellation of their live shows. Then came a soon-to-be regretted letter from the FBI that was deemed to have crossed a line and which only served to intensify the public’s interest in their music. The letter now sits in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Straight Outta Compton has since sold many millions of copies.