Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines
On this day in letters
Please join me in wishing the happiest of birthdays to the following letters1, all written on the third day of a July gone by.
It has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to be happy. I like so much to live and I hate the idea of dying one day. And then I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, and to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish... You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir
Letter to Nelson Algren
3rd July 1947
—Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed.
D. H. Lawrence
Letter to Edward Garnett
3rd July 1912
—The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence
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
Tell me, what is the point of having an empty car park before 11.00 a.m.? To set up a car park to keep cars out until after 11.00 a.m. is asinine; to have an empty car park in a choked city is to increase the congestion; an empty space where a car should be parked is contrary to organisation and common sense. In other words, what is the point of having an empty car park? Again, if they had a large notice at the entrance of the car park which you could not miss when you went in, saying ‘no parking until after 11.00 a.m.’ this would also help the situation. As I say, it is outrageous, therefore I have no intention of paying the fine, I will not be in Court on the day requested and I shall not pay any extra fine as the result of my non-appearance. Therefore your only way out is to send me to prison. I will gladly do this and make use of the media television and newspapers to put across my point of view.
Spike Milligan
Letter to the Magistrates’ Court
3rd July 1973
—Spike Milligan: Man of Letters
May I say now at once that I will not tolerate any tinkering with the personal nomenclature. Nor with the name/word Hobbit. I will not have any more Hompen (in which I was not consulted), nor any Hobbel or what not. Elves, Dwarfs/ves, Trolls, yes: they are mere modern equivalents of the correct terms. But hobbit (and orc) are of that world, and they must stay, whether they sound Dutch or not... If you think I am being absurd, then I shall be greatly distressed; but I fear not altered in my opinions. The few people I have been able to consult, I must say, express themselves equally strongly… I am no linguist, but I do know something about nomenclature, and have specially studied it, and I am actually very angry indeed.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Letter to his publisher, Rayner Unwin
3rd July 1956
—The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
And finally… on this day in 1905, after attending a performance of Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the relentlessly grumpy playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw wrote the following letter of complaint to The Times.
(Keep scrolling to watch this one being read for us at Letters Live by Benedict Cumberbatch.)
July 3rd 1905
Sir,
On Saturday night I went to the Opera. I wore the costume imposed on me by the regulations of the house. I fully recognise the advantage of those regulations. Evening dress is cheap, simple, durable, prevents rivalry and extravagance on the part of male leaders of fashion, annihilates class distinctions and gives men who are poor and doubtful of their social position (that is, the great majority of men) a sense of security and satisfaction that no clothes of their own choosing could confer, besides saving a whole sex the trouble of considering what they should wear on state occasions.
Now let me describe what actually happened to me at the Opera. Not only was I in evening dress by compulsion, but I voluntarily added many graces of conduct as to which the management made no stipulation whatever. I was in my seat in time for the first chord of the overture. I did not chatter during the music nor raise my voice when the Opera was too loud for normal conversation. I did not get up and go out when the statue music began. My language was fairly moderate considering the number and nature of the improvements on Mozart volunteered by Signor Caruso, and the respectful ignorance of dramatic points of the score exhibited by the conductor and stage manager — if there is such a functionary at Covent Garden. In short, my behaviour was exemplary.
At 9 o’clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the last act. I do not complain of her coming late and going early; on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier. For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly if someone had killed it by stamping on the beast, and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to bear the operation. I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person; but the spectacle sickened me. I presume that if I had presented myself at the doors with a dead snake round my neck, a collection of black beetles pinned to my shirtfront, and a grouse in my hair, I should have been refused admission. Why, then is a woman to be allowed to commit such a public outrage? Had the lady been refused admission, as she should have been, she would have soundly rated the tradesman who imposed the disgusting headdress on her under the false pretence that ‘the best people’ wear such things, and withdrawn her custom from him; and thus the root of the evil would be struck at; for your fashionable woman generally allows herself to be dressed according to the taste of a person who she would not let sit down in her presence. I once, in Drury Lane Theatre, sat behind a matinee hat decorated with the two wings of a seagull, artificially reddened at the joints so as to produce the illusion of being freshly plucked from a live bird. But even that lady stopped short of a whole seagull. Both ladies were evidently regarded by their neighbours as ridiculous and vulgar; but that is hardly enough when the offence is one which produces a sensation of physical sickness in persons of normal human sensibility.
I suggest to the Covent Garden authorities that, if they feel bound to protect their subscribers against the dangers of my shocking them with a blue tie, they are at least equally bound to protect me against the danger of a woman shocking me with a dead bird.
Yours truly,
G. Bernard Shaw
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For the record, it was not my intention to compile a list of letters mainly written by angry men.
I remember coming across a book of GBS's letters decades ago, when I was a teenager, and how and what he wrote appealed to me even then. He's a riot - totally in love with words and syntax, a joyful glee in delivering punchlines, and a righteous anger when it comes to animal rights. I'd argue that he's not wholly grumpy - there's humour and mischievousness in how and what he writes, but yes, he definitely adopts that "chucker out" (worth an image search) persona, for good ends, and sometimes just for puckish ends.
This gets at why old books endure. Human technology changes quickly, while jealousy, ambition, love, and vanity keep wearing familiar shoes.