27 October (1957): Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins
One of these days I’ll send you one of me and two of my friends but my friends are not very cooperative about having their pictures struck—don’t like to be seen with me or something.
Staff
24 October (1956): Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop
“I’ve shot my wad. Bear up, my dear, and come back to us. Elizabeth is grand, enormous, lovely and sends you her love, and I send mine…”
22 October (1939): Kenneth Patchen to James Laughlin
Below, poet Kenneth Patchen responds to New Directions Press founder James Laughlin’s frenzied, combative, and actually-kind-of-funny dispatch (which we published here on Monday) regarding the poet’s seeming failure to send vast numbers of NDP books to retailer. Patchen’s reply was … Continued
21 October (1913): Rainer Maria Rilke to Marie von Thurn und Taxis
And yet I would so much like the ‘Unknown Lady’ to speak to me…
20 October (1939): James Laughlin to Kenneth Patchen
“Now WHAT IS THE TROUBLE? I can’t dope it out. Are you eating the orders? Are you using them to paper the walls of your private megalomaniacal world? Or what?”
17 October (1844): Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hańska
Below, Balzac writes to longtime mistress Ewelina Hańska from his sick bed in Paris. Suffering from a crippling attack of “cerebral neuralgia,” Balzac variously instructs, exalts, and admonishes Hańska for her apparent “indifference” to him. In 1850, after a nearly twenty-year … Continued
16 October (1958): Alice B. Toklas to Harold and Virginia Knapik
“Last evening glorious red sky—this morning covered—it is trying to rain now. They merely say it is autumn. Today is the fête of the raisin (vendange) and the gaily uniformed bands are marching up the street under my window—cymbals drums fifes—odd toyish instruments—drum majors—and each has a half dozen brass. The music is quite simpleminded. Fortunately I dont have to go out to enjoy it.”
15 October (1824): Stendhal to Clémentine Beugnot
Later in life, Stendhal would declare, “The honor of having inspired me with the greatest passion, is to be debated between Mélanie, Alexandrine, Métilde and Clémentine.” Below, Stendhal writes to “Clémentine”—the comtesse Curial, née Clémentine Beugnot—with what certainly seems to … Continued
14 October (1854): Thomas De Quincey to Emily De Quincey
“It is a most rational justification of a name to my thinking—not that it expresses a quality as emphatically existing at a time when powers are latent, but forecasts the possible growth and fructification of the tendencies and faculties which it signifies.”
13 October (1819): John Keats to Fanny Brawne
My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further. You have asorb’d me.