A remarkable letter today. I hope it moves you as much as it does me. And keep scrolling for some book news.
Every now and then, a letter stops me in my tracks and reminds me why I fell in love with them in the first place. This is a fine example, and it comes from Alexander Woollcott, the American critic whose correspondence was so often full of wit and mischief. The year was 1928, and Woollcott had lost his beloved sister, Julie, after a long and painful illness. Soon afterwards, he wrote to Julie’s close friend, Lucy, to tell her about his sister’s final months and the terrible emptiness left by her death.
Dear Lucy,
When Julie died, I had a strong impulse to jump on a train and go to you as the only person left in the world to whom I could really talk about her.
I am glad you did not see her in those agonising summer months when her sickness first took hold of her, when she was trying to walk but couldn’t, unable to speak clearly but trying to all the time, shaking so that she could hardly guide a cigarette to her lips. It was cruel business.
The experts had some elaborate explanation of the inexplicable phenomenon—a progressive degeneration of the nerve tissue which defeats medicine and eludes surgery. But the ways of the spirit are mysterious and I know that she had just invented a way of getting out of a world that was too intolerably lonely for her without her husband. You could tell that from the peace and satisfaction which settled on her when the invention worked at last, for in the final six weeks at the hospital, there was no pain or distress or trouble.
She just lay there at rest in a room that somehow began to look like her, with the yellow roses on the table and the blue silk shawl thrown across the foot of her bed. Day by day the years seemed to fall away from her, cast off like garments she no longer needed. She did not know even me, but she was pleased when it was Paul Robeson’s voice on the phonograph and pleased when the nurse would put a gardenia on the pillow beside her. If you bent close, you could hear her say “Sweet, sweet.”
The lines went out of her face, the gray out of her hair, the pain out of her eyes. Her hair, braided and tied with little blue ribbons, lay tossed upon the pillow and framed so prettily a face that was the one you saw when she first came out to Kansas City nearly forty years ago.
The Julie that was turned toward you and toward me was the same all the way through—a gentle and gracious and gallant person in the very core of her. There was nothing base in her. Julie’s chapter is ended. She was perfume, scattered now on the ground. And there is just a small company of us—you, dear Lucy, and a few others, for whom the fragrance of her lingers in the air.
The Phalanx is ghostly now. There are strangers in the little cottage, so that what Aunt Anne used to call the “Julie light” can once more be seen through the trees. But the big house is mostly dark. When I used to come home at Christmas time from school, I could see it from a great way off through the bare branches of the trees, warm lamplight shining from each of the twelve French windows that looked out across the lawn. Now only two or three windows are lighted.
So one by one the lights go out. I have had to write you about them. It is because Julie loved you with a surpassing loyalty and tenderness. The miles and the years between made no difference to her at all—none at all. I think you knew that there was always that lamp in her window for you, always that loving kindness in her heart.
Something stops me from trying to say anything of the impoverishment I feel. What a world this would be—what a morning light would shine across it—if all people were like her. I think of that and of many things and I send you her love and mine. I wish I could stand beside you at some window today and look out into the twilight and say nothing.
Aleck
Source: The Letters of Alexander Woollcott, edited by Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey (The Viking Press, 1944).
Diaries of Note
Finally, at long last, my latest book, Diaries of Note, has arrived at Of Note HQ, and I’m now selling signed, personalised and gift-wrapped copies to anyone who would like one. Just head to my little bookshop for more information. It’s a collection of 366 remarkable diary entries from throughout history, written by all sorts of people, famous and otherwise, recording everything from extraordinary world events to the little dramas of everyday life.
One small warning: I’m based in the UK and will be sending all copies from here, so international postage can be rather expensive. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about that. You can, of course, find cheaper copies elsewhere, without the signature, personal message or gift-wrapping. I won’t be offended.
Thanks.
lovely letter
Written with so much softness and tenderness. 🫶🏾