July 29, 2016 Correspondence Saving Chester Himes’s Cat By Dan Piepenbring Chester Himes with his cat, Griot. Chester Himes and John Alfred Williams met in 1961 and soon began a long and occasionally tempestuous correspondence about their personal lives and the difficulty of finding a fair reception as African American writers in the publishing world. By the late sixties, Himes had moved to Spain, where he wrote Williams frequently about the privations of life abroad. In the letters below, they discuss Himes’s beloved cat, Griot. These excerpts come from Dear Chester, Dear John, a 2008 collection of the pair’s correspondence. Himes died in 1984; Williams passed away last summer, at eighty-nine. Read More
July 18, 2016 Correspondence Kool Customer By Hunter S. Thompson Hunter S. Thompson, who would be seventy-nine today, started smoking Kools when he was a sophomore in high school; he remained loyal to the brand until 1962, when he discovered Dunhills. In 1960, he wrote the letter below to the distribution manager of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. You can read more of Thompson’s early correspondence in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967. The Paris Review interviewed Thompson in our Fall 2000 issue. January 15, 1960164 Ave. FlamboyanesHyde Park, Puerto Rico Distribution ManagerBrown-Williamson Tobacco Co.Hill St.Louisville, Kentucky Dear Sir: I regret to inform you that Salems have all but swamped Kools in the Puerto Rico cigarette market. I don’t know if this makes much difference to you or not, but let me tell you that it bothers the mortal hell out of me. I’ve been smoking Kools for close to ten years, but down here I’d have an easier time getting a steady supply of reefers. There are god knows how many cigarette machines in San Juan, and in only three of them can I find king-size Kools. This is working a tremendous hardship on me, and I’m writing you in hopes that you’ll do something about it. Read More
July 1, 2016 Correspondence Dear Bill Cunningham By A. N. Devers At an auction in December 2010, I acquired a double-breasted men’s mink stroller coat owned by Edward Gorey. It was an unlikely purchase: I hadn’t intended to bid on anything, had never been to a proper auction before, and had very little money to my name. I was there to write something about the once-in-a-lifetime auction of Gorey’s personal hoard of fur coats—twenty-one in all. I was a Gorey fan, not, outside a first edition or two, a collector. But that morning, I had deposited a meager paycheck from adjunct professing, and I began to feel the emergence of a dream. I could own the coat. Why couldn’t I at least try? I could at least pretend to be that person who wins precious objects at auction. Read More
June 13, 2016 Correspondence You Waspy Wasp By Fernando Pessoa Fernando Pessoa, right, at the Café Martinho in Lisbon, 1914. In 1929, after a nine-year silence, Fernando Pessoa renewed his correspondence with Ophelia Queiroz, with whom he had enjoyed the only romance of his life. Where his earlier letters, from 1920, found him effusive (perhaps excessively) in his affections, this later chapter sees him in a far more disturbed frame of mind; by the end of the year he had broken off their correspondence again, this time for good. Read more of his letters in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. September 24, 1929 So tell me, my little Wasp (who’s not really mine, though you are a wasp), what words you want to hear from a creature whose mind took a spill somewhere on the Rua do Ouro, whose wits—along with the rest of him—got run over by a truck as it turned the corner onto the Rua de Sao Nicolau. Read More
June 6, 2016 Correspondence Tell Me How You Really Feel, Bro By Thomas Mann Thomas Mann, right, with his brother Heinrich. In December 1903, Thomas Mann wrote his older brother, Heinrich, a long letter reviewing the latter’s novel—with brutal candor. Some of the most scathing bits are below. The complete missive is in The Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949. My impressions? They are not exactly very pleasant—which impressions, indeed, don’t absolutely need to be. It didn’t exactly make agreeable reading—which, indeed, however, is absolutely not necessary either. I struggled back and forth with the book, threw it aside, took it up again, groaned, complained, and then got tears in my eyes again … For days, in the lowest barometric pressure in a hundred years (according to the meteorologist), I went about in the agony your book caused in me. Now I know approximately what I have to say to you. That I am not in agreement with your literary development—that must finally be said … When I think back ten, eight, five years! How do you appear to me? How were you? A refined connoisseur—next to whom I seemed to myself eternally plebeian, barbaric, and buffoonish—full of discretion and culture, full of reserve toward “modernity” and historically as talented as could be, free of all need for applause, a delicate and proud personality for whose literary endeavors there would quite probably be a select and receptive public … And now, instead of that? Instead, now these strained jokes, these vulgar, shrill, hectic, unnatural calumnies of the truth and humanity, these disgraceful grimaces and somersaults, the desperate attacks on the reader’s interest! … I read them and I don’t know you anymore. The psychological constant of the work, the desire of weak artificiality for life, this desire that would gladly masquerade as amorous desire within the lonely and sensuous artist—how is it supposed to move, to work convincingly when not even an attempt is being made to come close to life, to observe and capture even the air of the inner impulse of this simple madcap? Everything is distorted, screaming, exaggerated, “bellows,” “buffo,” romantic in the bad sense … Read More
June 2, 2016 Correspondence Thomas Hardy’s Letters Will Ruin Your Day By Dan Piepenbring Have a bad day. Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? Please stop. It’s Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and he will wipe the smile right off your smug, contented, life-affirming face. You’re dealing with a man who knew how to deploy the word Niflheim, defined by the OED as “the region of eternal darkness, mist, and cold inhabited by those who died from old age or illness.” Hardy uses it to dispirited perfection in The Woodlanders, relating a kind of failure to connect: “But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.” Actually, The Woodlanders is full of an evocative, despondent murkiness. It extends even to the tiny twigs on the ground, which Hardy takes care to describe as they’re destroyed by a passing carriage: “they drove on out of the grove, their wheels silently crushing delicate-patterned mosses, hyacinths, primroses, lords-and-ladies, and other strange and common plants, and cracking up little sticks that lay across the track.” But I’ve already digressed. I’m writing mainly to share a few excerpts from his letters that find him at his morose peak (nadir?). As a kind of warm-up, here’s a note from 1898 in which he critiques a prime minister’s funeral—always an exercise in good taste. Read More