How d’you like my new vocabulary?
On this day in letters
Before I get to today’s post: my little shop lost its mind yesterday and was quoting £20 to deliver a single Hemingway print to UK addresses, when in fact it should cost just £5 (on top of the cost of the print, which is currently discounted to £25). This is now fixed, so please try again if I unknowingly tried to sting you yesterday. And if you did pay £20 for delivery to a UK address, we’ll be refunding £15 to your account soon. Finally, delivering a print to the US does actually cost £20; that one isn’t an error. I truly wish it were cheaper. Thanks.
Happy birthday to the following letters, all of which were written on the twenty-third day of a July gone by.
The fight is hard. The enemy is strong and cruel, vicious. But no existing force can ever withstand the tremendous advance or crush the formidable resistance of a united people defending its freedom and its country. And above all we are fighting not only for Spain, but for the cause of humanity and peace.
Canute Frankson1
Letter home
23rd July 1937
—Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade From the Spanish Civil War
I felt very compunctious and rumpaxtious and gromboolious into the bargain. When I saw you go off, dripping, into the furnace this afternoon—Also red roaring rackety tackety rampagious at the thought of that multi faced Austrian [unidentified] making off with your nest egg, your very small bantam egg, laid with such prodigious labour too, and by such a magnificent dawn fiery cock—I should say hen.
How d’you like my new vocabulary?
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Ethel Smyth
23rd July 1931
—Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol.4
Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.
It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?
Mohandas Gandhi
Letter to Adolf Hitler2
23rd July 1939
I don’t think of Willy Wonka as an eccentric who holds on to his 1912 Dandy’s Sunday suit and wears it in 1970, but rather as just an eccentric — where there’s no telling what he’ll do or where he ever found his get-up — except that it strangely fits him: Part of this world, part of another. A vain man who knows colors that suit him, yet, with all the oddity, has strangely good taste. Something mysterious, yet undefined.
Gene Wilder
Letter to Mel Stuart, director of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory3
23rd July 1970
I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin’s position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that they have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I think they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and con-tributing to the chaos. ‘The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don't need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run.
John le Carré
Letter to William Burroughs
23rd July 2018
—A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré
I am so conscious of being no longer young. I never forget it for a moment. Also, I suppose one shouldn’t mind one’s looks beginning to go, but somehow one can’t help it. I look ten years older than when you saw me last year. Each day I mercilessly look at myself in the looking glass—and see my chin beginning to sag and my throat getting all wrinkled. Soon I shall be quite plain and there seems to be nothing to look forward to. You are the only person who cares what becomes of me, outside my family. It is so humiliating.
It’s awful to feel that one had left all one’s life behind one, that all that’s left is to get older and plainer every day. I’m such a coward. I’m frightened of death too. I shouldn’t be if I had been good, but alas! I have not been good. I have no spirit, no fighting capacity left — but, O Pat! I do believe in another better world.
Violet Trefusis
Letter to Pat Dansey
23rd July 1921
—Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921
You have written a dull unreadable book [In Cold Blood] which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker. You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.
William Burroughs
Letter to Truman Capote
23rd July 1970
All this anger has simply made me understand better that I love you more than my own skin, and that even though you don’t love me as much, you love me a little anyway—don’t you? If this is not true, I’ll always be hopeful that it could be, and that’s enough for me.
Frida Kahlo
Letter to Diego Rivera
23rd July 1935
—The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas
I must tell you a strange and unforgettable experience that stayed with me all my life. . .
It happened that one day the cold was drier than ever before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them, and a snowball thrown against an obstacle gave a flare of light like a loaf of sugar cut with a knife. In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked [my cat] Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.
My father was a very learned man; he had an answer for every question. But this phenomenon was new even to him. “Well,” he finally remarked, “this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.”
My mother seemed charmed. “Stop playing with this cat,” she said. “He might start a fire.” But I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded. Here I was, only three years old and already philosophising.
However stupefying the first observation, something still more wonderful was to come. It was getting darker, and soon the candles were lighted. Macak took a few steps through the room. He shook his paws as though he were treading on wet ground. I looked at him attentively. Did I see something or was it an illusion? I strained my eyes and perceived distinctly that his body was surrounded by a halo like the aureola of a saint!
I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvellous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself “what is electricity?” and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since that time and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.
Nikola Tesla
Letter to Pola Fotić4
23rd July 1938
During the Spanish Civil War, approximately 80 African Americans joined the fight against fascism by volunteering in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Canute Frankson was one of its first Black recruits.
Quick note that the photo caption says for Willy Wonka says "Jeremy Allen White on set (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)" Should say "Gene Wilder."
Oh Shaun, Tesla's cat will be in my heart forever. No wonder he was so brilliant. His cat was too.