Be a little vampire
A mixed mailbag
It’s time, once again, for a mixed mailbag. The only thing that connects the following excerpts is that they’ve been on my mind over the past few weeks. Enjoy your weekend.
I want your strength and your softness, your hands, all of you; you don’t know the things I remember and crave. Henry, Henry, I remember everything—the day in the woods, and the nights in Clichy, and the lawnmower…
Anaïs Nin
Letter to Henry Miller
5th August 1932
—A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953
My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt.
Gustave Flaubert
Letter to Louise Colet
9th August 1846
—The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857, Volume 1
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts – be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.
Nick Cave
Letter to Ruben, aged 13
February 2023
Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
August 1931
—Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
It annoys me when turds discuss the ‘art of poetry’ and so on. Poetry is nobody’s business except the poets’ & everybody else can fuck off (with a peculiar galloping motion.)
Philip Larkin
Letter to J. B. Sutton
20th December 1940
—Selected Letters of Philip Larkin
We are told not to trust appearance and to look beyond them for the real depth and value of the nature of the person. But in your case, try as I might, I cannot avoid concluding that you are a prize c**t1.
Lucian Freud
Letter to his brother, Clement
1954
—The Lives of Lucian Freud
Dear Keeper of The Golden Umbrellas And The Golden Keys to Wisdom And Happiness:
Truman Capote
Letter to his editor, Robert Linscott
11th March 1951
—Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote
I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.
Martha Gellhorn
Letter to Hortense Flexner and Wyncie King
25th August 1940
—Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
Voltaire
Letter to Élie Bertrand
5th January 1759
—Voltaire in His Letters: Being a Selection from His Correspondence
Lord what fools people are.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Violet Dickinson
26th November 1904
—The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1888-1912
Great hearts are like great suns. They contain their own light and warmth. You have no need, therefore, of praise; you do not even need thanks; but I must tell you that I love you more every day, not only because you are one of the marvels of the age, but also because you are one of its consolations.
Victor Hugo
Letter to Alexandre Dumas
8th March 1857
—The Letters of Victor Hugo, Volume 2
Very depressed. Rain all day. No money. Can’t write.
Evelyn Waugh
Letter to Lady Mary Lygon
12th November 1931
—Letters of Evelyn Waugh
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely “played.”
May Sarton
Letter to Louise Bogan
3rd July 1955
—May Sarton: Selected Letters
I have always—but especially in the last few years—thought you to be too full of shit to be quite human, else it would come out your mouth and pores, as it does sometimes. You are also a thing I especially dislike in another human being, perhaps because there are hints of it in myself, but only hints: a braggart and blowhard. An old man growing older ungracefully.
Al Purdy
Letter to Irving Layton
29th October 1984
—Yours Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy
When I had oesophageal cancer in 2022, you were kind enough to publish my letter about naming my tumour “Boris”, as an unwelcome growth that needed to be eliminated.
Well, I won that one, but now the gods have decided to bestow prostate cancer upon me. My shortlist of names this time around is “Donald”, “Elon”, “Vladimir” and “Nigel”.
Any better ideas?
Rodney Smith
Letter to The Guardian
October 2024
Support Letters of Note…
FYI Freud didn’t include asterisks here.
I like all these, though I’m glad that so far nobody has felt moved to write to me to tell me I’m a ‘complete c**t’.
Rodney Smith- last letter quoted- I don’t suppose he’ll read this, but if he does I’d like to tell him I wish him well. As it happens, when I received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2018, I called my own tumour ‘Boris’, too. The explanation I gave friends was that I’d been in danger of dismissing the lump as just a bit of a tit, whereas in fact it was very important to recognise its enormous capacity for irreversible damage, and take appropriate action. I had treatment which I’m hoping to find has worked, but the country who voted for the larger Boris in 2019 is still suffering from his effects.
The lawnmower?!
Cryptic Anais Nin!