I promise that your future correspondence will be returned to you unopened
On this day in letters
Happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the twelfth day of a January gone by.
I would rather read an unwritten novel by you than a written one by almost anybody else. I keep trying to discover what it is (what mysterious thing) that elevates writing to the level where combustion takes place, and I guess it is simply that in writing there has to be an escape of gases or vapors from the center—Core Gas, that is. And even this explanation is unreliable, because God knows there was always gas escaping from Hemingway but a lot of the time it reminded me of the farting of an old horse. This mystery is not going to get solved in a hurry.
E. B. White
Letter to John Updike
12th January 1962
—Letters of E. B. White
My tongue dies, my heart crackles: but my love for you remains.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Ethel Sands
12th January 1930
—The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4
I dined alone with Virginia Woolf last night. Oh dear, how much I love that woman.
Vita Sackville-West
Letter to her husband, Harold Nicolson
12th January 1923
—Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
I responded to your first letter out of courtesy. I ignored the second as a hint that I did not intend to become your permanent pen pal. The arrival of still a third obliges me to be a little more explicit.
I have always been interested in the morbid aberrations which drive persons like yourself so pompously to seek correspondence with strangers. In this respect your letters have been illuminating. But they also reveal you as a witless and meddlesome old ass, self-deluded and full of vapours.
I must, therefore, urge you in the future to address yourself to your own affairs rather than to mine. As an incentive toward this healthy goal, I promise that your future correspondence will be returned to you unopened.
Dalton Trumbo
Letter to ‘Mr. K.’
12th January 1948
—Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo
How sad it makes one feel to sit down quietly and think of the flight of the old year, and the unceremonious obtrusion of the new year upon our notice! How many things we have omitted to do which might have cheered a human heart, or whispered hope in the ear of the sorrowful, and how many things have we done over which the dark mantle of regret will ever fall! How many good resolutions did I make at the commencement of the year now flown, merely to break them and to feel more than ever convinced of the weakness of my own resolutions!
Emily Dickinson
Letter to Abiah Root
12th January 1846
—Dickinson Electronic Archives
I hope that the healing process continues & that it is no longer painful to use your hand. I remember when a fibroid neuroma was removed from my left hand, how agonising were the after effects (arm in sling etc.) and the pain which seemed to go on & on. I’m left handed. Still, I could manage the Barclays Bank1 with the right so that was OK.
Kenneth Williams
Letter to Jeffery Kemp
12th January 1988
—The Kenneth Williams Letters
The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.
Albert Einstein
Letter to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium
12th January 1953
When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master—which will have its way —putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature, new moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones.
Charlotte Brontë
Letter to George Henry Lewes
12th January 1848
—The Brontës: Life and Letters
On the 29th March you and I will both be fifty.
Has it ever occurred to you that, but for a twist of fate, I should be Prime Minister and you could have been the Man in the Nudge Nudge sketch from Monty Python?
I hope you don't feel too disappointed,
Happy birthday anyway.
Eric Idle
Letter to UK Prime Minister John Major
12th January 1993
—Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography
Support Letters of Note…
At the risk of stating the obvious to my intelligent readers, this is cockney rhyming slang.
Your footnote seems to imply you have readers that are unintelligent. Count me amongst them.
As someone born on 12 January, I feel truly seen by this post. Thank you for celebrating today with me, and for sharing such beautiful words of love, respect and laughter.