Let us toast to animal pleasures
On this day in letters
Please join me in wishing the happiest of birthdays to the following letters, all written on the seventeenth day of a January gone by.
To hell with unemployment: I think it’s a fine thing. I like sleeping all day and having nothing to do but read, write, and sleep whenever I feel tired. I like waking up in the morning and going immediately back to bed if the weather is foul. In short, I think it’s a fine situation for a man to be in: provided, of course, that he has enough money to eat and pay the rent. . .
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives, and to the “good life,” whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
Let us strip to the ankles and revel in everything sensual: let us laugh at the world as it looks at itself through mushroom-cloudy glasses, and I suppose we might as well pay the rent too: for eviction is second only to hunger as the dirtiest word in the dictionary.
Hunter S. Thompson
Letter to Sally Williams
17th January 1958
(From Proud Highway)
Friendship is fun and a loose mutual aid society. It isn’t soul-picking (your soul, note) and you’ve made me as furious as I’ve ever been. I won’t have this nonsense and this tyranny. I have never had it from anyone else and I’m not having it any more from you. Try growing up.
Martha Gellhorn
Letter to Betsy Drake
17th January 1983
(From Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn)
The only way the American Christmas could be simplified would be to change the date from December 25 to February 29. Then it would come every four years. I’ve advocated this for a long time but nobody pays attention to me.
E. B. White
Letter to Mrs. Cushman
17th January 1984
(From Letters of E. B. White)
Can any county claim more curious surnames than Sussex?
Pitchfork, Slybody, Devil, Lies, Hogsflesh, Sweetname, Juglery, Hollowbone, Stillborne, Fidge, Padge, Beatup, Wildgoose, and Whiskey are a few in the county archives that would certainly have interested Dickens. As for the names adopted during the Puritan revolution, there can surely be none so odd as those to be found in the Sussex registers. In 1632 Master Performe-thy-Vowes Seers, of Maresfield, married Thomasine Edwards; when his death was recorded his name had by then been abbreviated to Vowes Seers. A Heathfield wench was named More-fruits, and there are also on record Stand-fast-on-high Stringer, of Crowhurst; Weep-not Billing, of Lewes; Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith White, of Ewhurst; Kill-sin Pemble, of Withyam; and Fly-fornication Richardson, of Waldron.
Aytoun Ellis
Letter to The Times
17th January 1953
Snow means such special things to me. It means a fat soft plop, plop, as it is shovelled off the roofs and falls into the courtyard below. It means the strange melancholy halloo by which the deer are called to be fed, and which brings them bounding from all corners of the park. It means these things in an intimate way, like the ticking of the clock in one's own room means something; and is part of one.
Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Virginia Woolf
17th January 1926
(From The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf)
I don’t care a damn for an audience, or for ‘success’, but it is exciting—I suppose it’s the only external reward—to have things liked for the reasons one writes them, to be believed in by someone one believes in who’s right outside the nasty schools and the clever things one (me) doesn’t want to understand, like surrealism and Cambridge quarterlies and Communism and the Pope of Rome. And yes God does permit everything, and health’s only a little thing, and to the devil anyway with ‘personal troubles’ which are the devil—(mine are only the indescribably mean naggings of having absolutely no money at all, for I live on my few poems and stories and you know what that means, and a few rowdy habits, and the very insignificant melancholies of ‘things not coming right’ etc, and really nothing very much more). I’m a very happy sort of bird, and I don’t care much.
Dylan Thomas
Letter to Edith Sitwell
17th January 1936
(From The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas)
As I recall, Milton wrote a sonnet upon becoming twenty-three years old. Not only did he write a sonnet, but the damned thing has become immortal. Besides this, he’d written plenty of immortal stuff before he ever became twenty-three. Take the “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” written, I believe, at the age of nineteen.
Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, can write nothing.
Anthony Hecht
Letter to his parents
17th January 1946
Poor Anthony. I feel his pain. Nice collection today.
I with E.B White on this one.