You don't breathe, you bubble
When it's almost too hot to stay in touch
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
Jane Austen
Letter to Cassandra Austen
18th September 1796
—Jane Austen’s Letters
We are having the most monstrous heatwave. I don’t dare translate the thermometer readings into Fahrenheit, but suspect that if it were body temperature our brains would have burned out like the motor of my little electric fan in the middle of last night — causing sheer dank heat to wake me. You can bet I was out early this morning to buy a new one — only to have the clerks in the first 4 electrical supply shops appear puzzled by my request: Electric fan, who would ever want such a thing? No, we don’t carry them.
James Merrill
Letter to Rosie
19th July 1973
—A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill
Have you read in the papers about the terrific heat and drought? The heat was the worst I have ever felt, just couldn’t get away from it, day in and day out. Our grass was so burnt it looked like a shredded wheat biscuit. Thank God it ended a few days ago. Every one in the city looks half dead.
Aline Bernstein
Letter to Thomas Wolfe
18th August 1930
—My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein
The sun becomes indignant at the broad-brimmed hats of the boys, so it curls down round them, and up under them. It ripples and crackles along the curbing at noon. . . Dead worms on the side walks fry and sizzle, and the upholstery of autos left in the street bakes and cracks and burns your breeches. The little thermometers on store fronts mount as best they can, and then give it up as a bad job and settle down to a steady 100°.
E. B. White
Letter to his parents
16th July 1922
—Letters of E. B. White
‘Is it hot?’ you ask. MURDER. I don’t mind heat as much as cold, intense degrees of either, that is, but this is like nothing I have ever endured, even in Chicago or New York in a ‘heat wave.’ It never lets up. The humidity is often higher than the temperature. The result is that one cannot quite stand to eat properly and it is impossible to sleep normally. One moves slowly through the days and nights, pretending to be more than half-alive.
M. F. K. Fisher
Letter to Ted Kennedy
28th February 1965
—M.F.K. Fisher: A Life in Letters
I sweat all over the first sheet and had to start over. . . It has been hell hot now for three days. Wish you were here to sweat. I can out sweat all the big local sweaters and they are going to bring in outside competition and have me sweat derrier grosse motos. . . This is a shitty letter but its so damned hot.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Waldo Peirce
22nd July 1927
—The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1926–1929
Here we are in Delphi, all well except for Roger’s insides falling out and my skin peeling in great sores. The wind and sun, the bitter cold and violent heat, the driving all day along rocky or pitted roads, make one feel like a parboiled cactus.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Vanessa Bell
2nd May 1932
—The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5
Did you know Billy McCann, who is now in Rio de Janeiro? They are in the midst of one of the most terrific heat-waves Brazil has ever known, and one midday, Billy was staring out of his window (which looks over the ocean) when he saw an enormous black and white procession advancing, two by two, for, it seemed miles, in a straight line on the water. As it came nearer, he saw that it consisted of polar bears, polar seals, walruses and/or sea elephants, and penguins. Poor boys and girls, they had been carried straight from the North Pole or the polar opposite number to the Gulf Stream. The authorities from the Zoo gathered them up in air-conditioned ambulances, and they are now sitting on blocks of ice at the Zoo, where they were welcomed with rapture.
Edith Sitwell
Letter to Benjamin Britten
18th February 1956
—The Letters of Edith Sitwell
It’s been so frightfully hot here that I’ve been almost too weak to hold a pen, and even if I had been able, there was no ink — it had all evaporated into a cloud of black steam, and in that state it has been floating about the room, inking the walls and ceiling till they’re hardly fit to be seen
Lewis Carroll
Letter to
23rd May 1864
—The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll
Another heat wave is here and reminds me of last year at the same time. The heat is terribly dry and not at all like Montgomery and is so unexpected. The people feel deeply offended, as if they were being bombed.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Letter to Zelda Fitzgerald
11th October 1940
—A Life in Letters
Wake Island a hell hole of heat. . . I should go out and walk around and I dread it. It’s like swimming in warm blood, humidity 300 percent. You don’t breathe, you bubble.
John Steinbeck
Letters to Elaine Steinbeck
September 1957
—Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
