"I've just written a lot of turdy letters to strangers." Writers' Letters - Search and Destroy

Do you get that much? Find yourself writing things like unable to accept your kind invitation to address the Literary Soc- any merit. However this is only one man's opinion and your poems give up all debating, especially on facetious motions. I hope you away from my typewriter. So I will just wish the festival all the charity already and feel I should not 'spread myself too thin,' or secretary recently and can only assume the previous one failed to sorry about the delay which was due to please accept my apologies. No I wouldn't mind if they all stopped writing.

At the request of xyzzzz__.

The above is Amis to Larkin, both of whom would be first on my list, especially in the letters they wrote to each other.

Others that spring to mind immediately -

Byron. RL Stevenson. E Waugh.

NOT Julian MacLaren-Ross.

Flaubert's letters are head of my list. The earlier ones, before he's really published anything, are astounding: he's showing off and posing and phrase-making, but his early creative energy goes into them. Let me look, ok, quick quote:

When I was young, I had a comprehensive premonition of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking seeping out through an open window. No need to eat any to know that it would make you vomit.

Byron especially seconded. Also (cap'n obvious time) Keats. His have the unusual virtue of being brilliant without making me think 'well... he's a bit of a shit.'

Elizabeth Bishop also seems entirely unshitlike, though I should read more: there was a bit too much poet-politics - discussions of publishers, editors, positions, etc. - for me to really love her letters, despite the likeability of that hectic descriptive style. But I guess that's the problem with letters (I mean issues of reading other people's mail aside) - the interesting side of it (a look at the creative process, remarkable imaginations in casual dress, idle speculation, random life detail) can slide into dullness or worse - like you're back to reading uncooked biography or are accumulating useless gossip.

I just remembered Byron in one of his letters asking, I think, not to have earnings from Childe Harold go towards paying off his debts - his reasoning being something like 'What I earn by my brain I will spend on my balls'. Maybe that should have been the thread title as evading debts seems to be one of the most regularly recurring features of writers' letters.

Or Wyndham Lewis' telegram, not even a letter I think, to one of his long-suffering benefactors - WHERE'S THE FUCKING STIPEND.

They're often quite good when they're just starting out, and have that initial wave of success - the pleasure of extending acquaintance beyond their immediate youthful circle, excitement in epistolary and literary acquaintance.

Also these writers do have a habit of falling in love/become totally psychologically obsessed and writing a load of letters to the object of their desires. Those letters tend to all sound the same, but exert an unhealthy fascination. Alexander Pope of self-consciously literary epistles to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, didn't he? Before the spectacular bust up and rather unfortunate ape poem.

And RLS's obsession with Frances Sitwell is most unhealthy. She's NOT your mother, Robert, seriously, and saying that after you've been saying how much you love her for three pages doesn't make it any better.

I seem to remember Ezra Pound's letters were pretty good.

you often get a complete change of tone - wait, have I got false memory syndrome thinking I read a load by Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (before the ape poem and that rather spectacular bust up).

No, I don't think you have false memory syndrome. Pope & Lady MWM definitely correspond, and it's definitely self-consciously literary, but I can't check any details at the mo. Oh wait, here we go. Or do you think you didn't actually read them?

God I have just spent 20 minutes getting my brain back round the textual history of Pope's letters. There's wasted time.

Right, I wasn't sure whether I was making it all up. I do now remember reading them.

Clearly I don't remember to edit my posts properly either - bad habit of relegating half thoughts to the bottom of the page and forgetting about them.

Christ though I'd spend a good deal more than 20 minutes dredging up the textual history of Pope's letters. I could probably just about do it for his Pastorals.

Incidentally, RLS to a friend Charles Baxter in January 1874 -

'How about work? Stick it in; we shall never be swells, but we can be cheesy sort of shits, with a push.'

Sounds surprisingly ahead of its time, but I've no idea what he's on about really.

Which reminds me of another virtue of letters - the informal written language of the age.

Yes - slangyness and private language are a joy. And just remembered that Beckett's letters have been very enjoyable - they're full of swearing, stupid & show-off jokes, money worries etc (as well as all that serious life of mind, deep personal revelation stuff, w/e). Maybe down to his being a late starter too?

NOT Julian MacLaren-Ross.

God, what a disappointment these were--"Send me money." I need money." "Send me my money." "I have no money."

Jean Rhys' letters were similarly a let-down--"O, I am so feeble and helpless and alone." x 100 (I exaggerate, but not much)

But as for good ones...

I second Keats.

Also William Hazlitt's 'Liber Amoris', which is mostly letters recording his obsession with his landlady's daughter--letters to and from the girl, and to Hazlitt's friends, completely losing all dignity in the process, but some lovely writing

(Thanks Gamaliel)

The one Hazlitt I struggled with, fascinating in places but it took me a while to find my compass again after reading that. Must revisit.

What are the letters of Ezra Pound like? I read an article today that quotes some of the messages sent to people where he is trying to build contacts with the ultimate aim to facilitate some kind of bizarre 'cultural project' in fascist Italy.

Love to get hold of: Kafka's letters to his father, the Adorno-Benjamin correspondence, the three way between Rilke, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak.

January 17, 1961

Hello Mr. Corrington:

Well, it helps sometimes to receive a letter such as yours. This makes two. A young man out of San Francisco wrote me that someday they would write books about me, if that would be any help. Well, I'm not looking for help, or praise either, and I'm not trying to play tough. But I had a game I used to play with myself, a game called Desert Island and while I was laying around in jail or art class or walking toward the ten dollar window at the track, I'd ask myself, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island by yourself, never to be found, except by the birds and the maggots, would you take a stick and scratch words in the sand? I had to say "no," and for a while this solved a lot of things and let me go ahead and do a lot of things I didn't want to do, and it got me away from the typewriter and it put me in the charity ward of the county hospital, the blood charging out of my ears and my mouth and my ass, and they waited for me to die but nothing happened. And when I got out I asked myself again, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island and etc.; and do you know, I guess it was because the blood had left my brain or something, I said, YES, yes, I would. I would take a stick and I would scratch words in the sand. Well, this solved a lot of things because it allowed me to go ahead and do the things, all the things I didn't want to do, and it let me have the typewriter too; and since they told me another drink would kill me, I now hold it down to 2 gallons of beer a day.

But writing, of course, like marriage or snowfall or automobile tires, does not always last. You can go to bed on Wednesday night being a writer and wake up on Thursday morning being something else altogether. Or you can go to bed on Wednesday night being a plumber and wake up on Thursday morning being a writer. This is the best kind of writer.

... Most of them die, of course, because they try too hard; or, on the other hand, they get famous, and everything they write is published and they don't have to try at all. Death works a lot of avenues, and although you say you like my stuff, I want to let you know that if it turns to rot, it was not because I tried too hard or too little but because I either ran out of beer or blood. [* * *]

For what it's worth, I can afford to wait: I have my stick and I have my sand.

early bukowski letters

Some of my favorites:

Byron
Keats
Woolf
Wallace Stevens
Bishop-Lowell