You go to hell, you
On this day in letters
Happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the third day of an August gone by.
Oh, oh, oh, the heat!
It comes round corners at you like an animal with windmill arms. As I enter my bedroom, it stuns, thuds, throttles, spins me round by my soaking hair, lays me flat as a mat and bat-blind on my boiled and steaming bed. We keep oozing from the ice-cream counters to the chemist’s. Cold beer is bottled God. If ever, for a second, a wind, (but wind’s no word for this snailslow sizzle-puff), protoplasmically crawls from the suffering still sea, it makes a noise like Hilda Doolittle’s poems crackling in a furnace.
Dylan Thomas
Letter to Margaret Taylor
3rd August 1947
—Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Constantine Fitzgibbon
I shall be alone Thursday night. Could you stay two nights? I don’t want to seem as if I had you in secret, though it’s infinitely more to my taste, exploring about in the recesses secretly. Write me a tactful letter, making out a good case for whatever it is: and let it be as long as you can. (Your stay and your letter.) No one else is coming.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Vita Sackville-West
3rd August 1927
—Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, edited by Nigel Nicolson
The conflict between the greed of developers and the freedom of the rest of us is as old as civilization. But now the developers come at us armed with the weapons of industrial technology. We’re not going to stop the bulldozers with lectures in theoretical physics. We can only stop them with active resistance, steadfast unyielding opposition both personal and organized. Throw out of office the flunky politicians who serve [the developers]. Drown in laughter the bald-headed transistorized near-sighted factory-made economists (with their floppy-disc brains) who prepare their position papers. And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain. As Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, “Humankind will never be free until the last corporation executive is strangled with the entrails of the last systems engineer analyst.”
“But what about jobs?” they’ll cry, opening up their business suits to reveal their fake bleeding hearts with the genuine simulated polystyrene tears, “the people need jobs.” To which I reply: I need a job. My brother-in-law needs a job. All God’s children need jobs. Get off our backs, get out of our land, go back to the moon where you came from, and we’ll find plenty of work to do. Good work. And we’ll share it.
Edward Abbey
Letter to Century magazine
3rd August 1983
—Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, edited by David Petersen
You say of your children, “Whatever will they think of me when they grow up?” They will grow up as we did, trampling lightly on codes of morality, fanatical about their own code. What that code may be, we can’t tell; but we can be perfectly sure it won’t be like any other in the world before. But the judgement of their hearts is foretellable. They will judge you as a person who had a light step, a long look, a comfortable way of laughing, who could hoist one into a tree and lift one down again at the right moment, whose coat’s shoulder had a particular smell. That is how.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Letter to a friend on the brink of divorce
3rd August 1952
—Letters Of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by William Maxwell
you go to hell, you. you’re a masochist. and a deceiver of women.
Shirley Jackson
Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman
3rd August 1938
—The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman
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Leaves me smiling, the suddenness.
Just wonderful. Thank you.