Katherine A. Powers reviews Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, a volume that includes a wide-range of “personal letters, memos, telegrams, open letters written chiefly for political purposes, and a couple of form letters.” She notices that love and death stand out as themes in the first category:
Love letters, which I am guessing make up the majority of the personal letters written today (with letters of umbrage running second by a slim margin) are present, and they are, to say the least, fraught.
Emily Dickinson writes passionately to her sister-in-law, and a German woman in a mental hospital writes two words over and over to her husband: “Sweetheart, come.” Zelda Fitzgerald, after a blow-up with Scott, declares that she needs him so badly that she wouldn’t mind if he was “covered in sores like a leper.” Rebecca West, given the hook by that smug bounder H. G. Wells, combines love with acid: “Your spinsterishness,” she informs him, “makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent spectacle and a reversal of the natural order of things.”
The selection shows again that absence strengthens love, and never more so when brought about by death. Heartfelt letters to dead lovers come from physicist Richard Feynman writing to his wife and Katharine Hepburn to Spencer Tracy. A pregnant sixteenth-century Korean widow implores her deceased husband to come to her in her dreams. In fact, death is all around us in this volume: other suicidal correspondents include a seventeenth-century Japanese woman writing to her slain samurai husband, saying she is going to kill herself to join him. Virginia Woolf writes to Leonard about how she can’t live with her madness, and a kamikaze pilot tells his two young children that he will be watching over them as a god and instructs his five-year-old son to “be an unbeatable person like your father and avenge my death.” Robert Falcon Scott, freezing and starving in the Antarctic, writes a farewell letter to his wife, and someone at the FBI (as it turns out) writes anonymously to Martin Luther King Jr., advising him to commit suicide.
Check out the book’s companion blog, Letters of Note, here.
(Photo by Liz West)
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