Do you think I shall ever write a really good book?
On this day in letters
Please join me in wishing a happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the first day of an October gone by.
I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.
Charles Darwin
Letter to Charles Lyell
1st October 1861
—Darwin Correspondence Project
No one really takes very much interest, why should they, in my scribblings. Do you think I shall ever write a really good book?
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Violet Dickinson
1st October 19051
—Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1; 1888-1912
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Hunter S. Thompson
Letter to the editor of the Vancouver Sun
1st October 1958
—Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot
Letter to Maria Lewis
1st October 1841
—George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals
What you ought to do is write you big lazy bastard. My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can’t write—never will be able to write a line—can’t go on—can’t get started—stuff is rotten—can’t say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds. You would write better than anybody but the minute it becomes impossible you stop. That is the time you have to go on through and then it gets easier. It always gets utterly and completely impossible.
Thank God it does—otherwise everybody would write and I would starve to death.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Waldo Pierce
1st Oct 1928
—The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2
Art is no mere game of the intellect; it is a special atmosphere that we breathe. But if in search of more and more potent air we descend ever deeper into art’s subterranean recesses, who knows that we may not end by breathing deadly miasmas?
Gustave Flaubert
Letter to Louise Colet
1st October 1852
—The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, edited by Francis Steegmuller
This newsletter continues to exist thanks to the generosity of its readers. If you haven’t already, and if you’re able, please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a donation. And if you can’t do any of that, please spread the word by sharing the newsletter with others. Thank you.
Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out, would be published ten years later.
I'm sure Mr Darwin and I are related.
I feel much like Darwin did, today.