Wherever you go there are always people
On this day in letters
Please join me in wishing the happiest of birthdays to the following letters, all written on the first day of a March gone by.
Herewith an unfinished MS of a book called Stuart Little. It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it. You said you wanted to look at this, so I am presenting it thus in its incomplete state. There are about ten or twelve thousand words so far, roughly.
You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character in the story has somewhat the attributes and appearance of a mouse. This does not mean that I am either challenging or denying Mr. Disney’s genius. At the risk of seeming a very whimsical fellow indeed, I will have to break down and confess to you that Stuart Little appeared to me in dream, all complete, with his hat, his cane, and his brisk manner. Since he was the only fictional figure ever to honor and disturb my sleep, I was deeply touched, and felt that I was not free to change him into a grasshopper or a wallaby. Luckily he bears no resemblance, either physically or temperamentally, to Mickey. I guess that’s a break for all of us.
E. B. White
Letter to his editor, Eugene Saxton
1st March 1939
(From Letters of E. B. White)
Modern life gets less and less worth living, is my solemn conclusion. Wherever you go there are always people.
William Maxwell
Letter to Sylvia Townsend Warner
1st March 1954
(From The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell)
Spring is here—and I could be very happy, except that I am broke. Would you mind paying me now instead of on publication for those so stunning verses of mine which you have? I am become very, very thin, and have taken to smoking Virginia tobacco.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Letter to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe
1st March 1918
(From Into the World’s Great Heart: Selected Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay)
I should have remembered on the 22nd about your anniversary on February 27th. I did know and remember it, but there’s a big difference between an abstract awareness in one’s memory of a forthcoming date, and paying attention to the real days of our lives, which might pass without being numbered in any way, monotonously grim as they are, so many thousands of versts1 from any kind of festivity. I had in my mind the last possible date for sending you a letter of congratulations to reach you by the 27th, and went on carrying the date with me and waiting, while the 27th itself had long come and gone.
Boris Pasternak
Letter to his parents
1st March 1930
(From Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence 1921-1960)
If I love you any more the top bit of my hair will blow off with a pop like a champagne cork.
Katherine Mansfield
Letter to John Middleton Murry
1st March 1918
(From The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 2)
Peter Brook told us a divine story. He met a tart in London and was talking to her. She said, “You know that torture room in Curzon Street?” (Peter didn’t, of course.) “Well, I had a client the other day with rather special tastes and I thought I would book us there for an hour or two, and we went, and imagine, when we got to the room, there was Alec Guinness on the rack!”
John Gielgud
Letter to Paul Anstee
1st March 1961
(From Gielgud’s Letters)
It made me so happy to receive a letter in your own handwriting.
Though I was terribly sad to read between the lines and know how great is your suffering. It is so feeble when one tries to show the sympathy that one is feeling. For one who is suffering so greatly must think: “How can they know?”
But the sympathy is there, the feeling is there. And we try by some invisible means to give you strength.
Edith Sitwell
Letter to Demetrios Capetanakis2
1st March 1944
(From Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell)
What about the jacket? After thinking it over, I would rather not involve butterflies. Do you think it could be possible to find today in New York an artist who would not be influenced in his work by the general cartoonesque and primitivist style jacket illustration? Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)?
There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.
Vladimir Nabokov
Letter to his publisher, Walter J. Minton
1st March 1958
(From Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters)
A verst is a Russian unit of length equal to 0.663 mile or 1.067 kilometres. But you already knew that.
Greek poet Demetrios Capetanakis died of leukemia eight days later.
I empathise with William Maxwell!
I know that feeling of the top of one's hair popping off like a cork with intensity of feeling!