August 2, 2017 Correspondence A Letter from Sam Shepard to Johnny Dark By Jeffery Gleaves Photos courtesy of the authors and The Wittliff Collection. From a September 4, 1990 letter from Sam Shepard, who died last week at the age of seventy-three, to Johnny Dark. Shepard and Dark’s forty-plus years of correspondence is collected in Two Prospectors, which was named after their unfinished, cowritten play. Dear John, Funny I should get your letter on the very same day I’m cleaning out one of my many neglected filing cabinets—full of old letters, manuscripts, notes—piles of papers & I came across your huge book of notes you sent me of our endless dialogues—other letters from you, dating clear back to England & a great black & white photo of the two of us destroying the front porch in Nova Scotia—me leaping off the steps with a hammer & you in the background with bushy black hair like the early Bob Dylan—we look like we’re in High School or something & I thought what a great friendship it was! Truly great. I miss the very same things—just riding around in the white Chevy talking about any old thing that floated into our demented imaginations & then, momentarily, actually becoming characters & acting them out as we wandered through grocery stores or the streets of San Francisco or San Rafael on a brisk stoned afternoon. Somehow, it always reminded me of drunken Irish characters from Flann O’Brien—stumbling from bar to bar, spouting poetry, singing ballads & making up outrageous stories—always in trouble with women & ultimately pathetically alone. I hope some way we can again strike up our own private dialogues—hysterically funny to us only—maybe as very old men on a bus stop or a park bench in some place like Lincoln, Nebraska where we’re equally lost. I, too, have been going through the same heart-wrenching stuff you describe—(maybe not the same but with the same results) & each time I come out the other end of it I think—aah, at last it’s over—I can get on with my life again but it keeps coming back. I’m convinced now it has nothing to do with women although I make myself believe I wouldn’t feel this way if it wasn’t for “her.” Writing is such a pain in the ass. I’d like to just talk & maybe walk that’s about it. I’m exhausted from it all. Hope we can find a way to meet up & have a good time one of these days. It would be great to see you. Love to Scarlett & my ex-wife if you see her. And tell my son to call me—I’ve left messages all over hell for him. I remember the last words my Dad ever wrote me in a letter—“See you in my dreams.” How ’bout that. Your on-going amigo, Sam From Two Prospectors. © 2013 by Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark; published by the University of Texas Press.
July 27, 2017 Correspondence Cosmic Mindlessness By Jeffery Gleaves James Tate, ca. 1965. James Tate, who moved often during the sixties and seventies, frequently updated his mentor and friend Gene DeGruson on his writing and on personal matters. Though routine in topic, Tate’s correspondence was often as humorous and purposeful as his poems; “I love my funny poems,” he said in his Writers at Work interview, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.” From a 1969 letter to DeGruson: Read More
April 17, 2017 Correspondence The Quarreling Gondoliers By Dan Piepenbring John Singer Sargent, Gondoliers’ Siesta, ca. 1904. From a 1952 letter by the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, who was born on this day in 1897. “A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it,” Wilder told The Paris Review in his 1956 Art of Fiction interview. “On the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity.” Read more of Wilder’s correspondence in The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. Where do I go next? I don’t know … I don’t want to go to Paris. I want to go to a little hotel in St. Moritz (already under snow) and work at what only pleases me. What is there to confer about? Let them come to me. I think that Monday or Tuesday I will entrain for Milan and there at 1:25 take the autobus arriving at 6:10 in St. Moritz … Think of that drive, past Como, up up the dramatic Italian alps and then in the evening light in the square of that Swiss village. Read More
February 8, 2017 Correspondence Infinite Mischief By Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop was born on this day in 1911. In the early seventies, her friend Robert Lowell sent her the poems that would form his collection The Dolphin—in which, without permission, he’d quoted the distraught letters his partner Elizabeth Hardwick had sent him after he left her. (“your clowning makes us want to vomit,” one poem goes: “you bore / bore, bore the friends who … wished to save your image / from this genteel, disgraceful hospital.”) Bishop, shocked to read the new work, sent him the impassioned rebuke excerpted below. The Dolphin, when it was eventually published, won a Pulitzer Prize. Read more of Bishop and Lowell’s letters in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008), edited Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Read More
January 25, 2017 Correspondence Shut up in the Dark By Dan Piepenbring Woolf, ca. 1902. In July 1910, after she had attempted to kill herself by defenestration, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) was institutionalized at Burley House, “a nursing home for women with nervous disorder.” She wrote the letter below to her sister, Vanessa Bell. Read more of Woolf’s correspondence in the five-volume Letters of Virginia Woolf. I meant to write several days ago, although you do say you dont care a damn. But in that too I was hoodwinked by Miss Thomas. I gather that some great conspiracy is going on behind my back. What a mercy we cant have at each other! or we should quarrel till midnight, and Clarissas (the coming ‘neice’) deformities, inherited from generations of hard drinking Bells, would be laid at my door. She-(Miss T.) wont read me or quote your letters. But I gather that you want me to stay on here. She is in a highly wrought state, as the lunatic upstairs has somehow brought her case into court; and I cant make her speak calmly. Do write and explain. Having read your last letter at least 10 times—so that Miss Bradbury (nurse) is sure it is a love letter and looks very arch—I cant find a word about my future … I really dont think I can stand much more of this. Miss T. is charming, and Miss Bradbury is a good woman, but you cant conceive how I want intelligent conversation—even yours. Religion seems to me to have ruined them all. Miss T. is always culminating in silent prayer. Miss Somerville (patient), the absent minded one with the deaf dog, wears two crucifixes. Miss B. says Church Bells are the sweetest sound on earth. She also says that the old Queen the Queen Mother and the present Queen represent the highest womanhood. They reverence my gifts, although God has left me in the dark. They are always wondering what God is up to. The religious mind is quite amazing. Read More
January 6, 2017 Correspondence Gloomed and Uglied Away By Dan Piepenbring Zora Neale Hurston. From a letter Zora Neale Hurston sent to her editor, Burroughs Mitchell, in 1947. Hurston’s correspondence is collected in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002), edited by Carla Kaplan. Read More