Helen Keller Had Impeccable Handwriting: See a Collection of Her Childhood Letters

in Education, History, Letters, Life | October 3rd, 2016

Image by Flickr, courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind

The inspirational blind and deaf activist and educator Helen Keller learned to speak aloud, but, to her great regret, never clearly.

Her careful penmanship, above, is another matter. Her impeccably rendered upright hand puts that of a great many sighted people—not all of them physicians—to shame.

Keller learned to write—and read—with the help of embossed books as a student at Perkins School for the Blind. The United States didn’t adopt Standard Braille as its official system for blind readers and writers until 1918, when Keller was in her late 30’s. Prior to that blind readers and writers were subjected to a number of competing systems, a situation she decried as “absurd.”

Some of these systems had their basis in the Roman alphabet, including Boston Line Type, the brainchild of Perkins’ Founding Director, Samuel Gridley Howe, an opponent of Braille. Students may have preferred dot-based systems for taking notes and writing letters, but Boston Line Type remained Perkins’ approved printing system until 1908.

There’s more than an echo of Boston Line Type in Keller’s blocky characters, as well as her spacing. Deviating from penmanship forms learned at school is a luxury exclusive to the sighted. Until formation became instinctual, Keller relied on a grooved board to help her size her characters correctly, an exhausting process. Small wonder that she ended many of her early letters with “I am too tired to write more.”

Perkins has published a Flickr album of letters Keller wrote between the ages of 8 and 11 to then-director Michael Anagnos, including 3 pages in French. Leafing through them, I marveled less at her ability and determination than my (sighted) 16-year-old son’s lack of interest in developing a respectable-looking hand.

Keller’s handwriting is so above reproach that it quickly fades to the background, upstaged by her charming manners and girlish preoccupations. A sample:

If you go to Roumania, please ask the good queen Elizabeth about her little invalid brother and tell her that I am very sorry that her darling little girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vittorio, the little prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remember so many messages.

Browse Perkins’ collection of Keller’s handwritten letters to Michael Anagnos here.

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and winemaker who played Annie Sullivan in her high school’s production of The Miracle Worker. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Steamy Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925–1929)

in Letters, Literature | July 4th, 2016

Everyone loves a love story—especially a love affair. We may think ourselves above a juicy scandal…, but who are we kidding? Tragically, however, for many famous people of the past—from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing to Tab Hunter—affairs could not only end careers and reputations, they could end lives. People who would much rather not have to hide their love have been forced to do so by rigid social propriety, religious moralism, and repressive law.

In other famous cases, however—like that of Virginia Woolf and her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West—an affair doesn’t end in tragedy but simply in a cooling of passions into a beautiful, lasting friendship.

While prudish outsiders may have been scandalized, neither Woolf’s nor Sackville-West’s husband found the relationship shocking. Leonard Woolf, his wife reported, regarded the affair as “rather a bore… but not enough to worry him.” Vita and her aristocratic husband Harold Nicolson, writes the Virginia Woolf blog, “were both bisexual and… had an open marriage.” Furthermore, the bohemian artistic circle in which the Woolfs moved—the Bloomsbury group—hardly troubled itself about such mundane goings-on as a steamy affair between two married women. So much for social scandal and soap-operatic theatrics.

But while their love was not forbidden, what passion they had while it lasted! One need only read their letters to each other, collected in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Many of those epistles document the heated period between the mid-1920s, when their affair began, and 1929, when it ended on amiable terms (in a friendship the letters document until Woolf’s suicide in 1941).

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” writes Sackville-West in a 1926 letter to Woolf, “You have broken down my defences. And I really don’t resent it… Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.” The brief, agonized letter captures the exquisite pangs and pinions of romantic infatuation. Woolf, in response, is the more reserved, but also the more colorful, with playful, cryptic images that hint at who knows what:

“Always, always, always I try to say what I feel,” she writes, “I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a longeared owl and ass…. Open the top button of your jersey and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same—”

In her diary, Woolf described Sackville-West on their first meeting in 1923 as “a pronounced sapphist…. Snob as I am, I trace her passions – 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.” Woolf was ten years older than Sackville-West, and seemed to feel inferior to her lover, comparing herself unfavorably in a sexy 1925 diary entry:

Vita shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks…pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung…There is her maturity and full-breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood…her in short (what I have never been) a real woman.

The two had other lovers, and Woolf, “as the older woman in the relationship,” the Virginia Woolf blog writes, felt “unwanted and dowdy” as Sackville-West strayed. But though the love affair ended, it not only produced a close friendship, but a novel, Woolf’s Orlando, which Vita’s son Nigel called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

Their love and friendship will also soon produce a film, Vita and Virginia, directed by Chanya Button and written by Dame Eileen Atkins. And, if you were wondering what Vita and Virginia’s passionate exchanges would sound like in a 21st century idiom, have a look at “The Collected Sexts of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West” at The New Yorker. The eloquence of an epistolary romance may be a thing of the past, but email and text have their own efficient charms:

Vita: Hey girl
Virginia: Hey
Vita: Sup?
Virginia: In bed
Vita: Hot
Virginia: Come visit?
Vita: Mmm can’t. Have a toothache.

Cute. But what could ever replace one of Woolf’s last letters to her friend and former lover, written in 1940 while Britain endured German air bombardments: “there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say– except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest—let me have a line…You have given me such happiness….”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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President Warren G. Harding’s Steamy Love Letters

in Letters | June 29th, 2016

If you know something about American history, you know that Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) will never appear on Mount Rushmore. He died during his unpopular first term in office, tarnished by the Teapot Dome scandal and revelations of an extramarital affair. Harding once apparently said, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” And historians tend to agree. Consistently polls ranking the performance of American presidents put him at the bottom of the list.

History might, however, look more kindly upon Harding’s love letters, the byproduct of his womanizing ways. Before taking office, Harding fathered a love child with Nan Britton, a woman 31 years his junior. He also carried on a 15-year affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips, a friend’s wife, to whom he started writing letters in 1910. And what letters they were. Here’s one from January 28, 1912:

I love your poise

Of perfect thighs

When they hold me

in paradise…

I love the rose

Your garden grows

Love seashell pink

That over it glows

I love to suck

Your breath away

I love to cling —

There long to stay…

I love you garb’d

But naked more

Love your beauty

To thus adore…

I love you when

You open eyes

And mouth and arms

And cradling thighs…

If I had you today, I’d kiss and

fondle you into my arms and

hold you there until you said,

‘Warren, oh, Warren,’ in a

benediction of blissful joy.… I

rather like that encore

discovered in Montreal.

Did you?

And another from September 15, 1913, which John Oliver playfully mocks above:

Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief untilI take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts. Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied.… Wouldn’t you like to hear me ask if we only dared and answer, “We dare,” while souls rejoicing sang the sweetest of choruses in the music room? Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake — for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond?

Oh, Carrie mine! You can see I have yielded and written myself into wild desire. I could beg. And Jerry came and will not go, says he loves you, that you are the only, only love worthwhile in all this world, and I must tell you so and a score or more of other fond things he suggests, but I spare you. You must not be annoyed. He is so utterly devoted that he only exists to give you all. I fear you would find a fierce enthusiast today.

Originally unearthed by historian Francis Russell in 1964, the letters were donated to the Library of Congress, where they remained under seal until 2014. You can find scans of the original Warren G. Harding-Carrie Fulton Phillips Correspondence on the LOC website. (The LOC also produced an informative video on the exchange.) Read transcriptions of the best letters at The New York Times.

Dear Immanuel — Kant Gives Love Advice to a Heartbroken Young Woman (1791)

Ernest Hemingway’s “Love Letter” to His “Dearest Kraut,” Marlene Dietrich (1955)

Read Beethoven’s Lengthy Love Letter to His Mysterious “Immortal Beloved” (1812)

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Hear Anaïs Nin Read From Her Celebrated Diary: A 60-Minute Vintage Recording (1966)

in Books, Letters | June 28th, 2016

Image by George Leite, via Wikimedia Commons

At one time, writer Anaïs Nin’s reputation largely rested on her passionate, long-term love affair with novelist Henry Miller, whom she also financially supported while he wrote his best-known novels and became, writes Sady Doyle, a “darling of the avant-garde.” Nin herself was a marginalized, “unfashionable” writer, whose “frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs and incest” brought such critical opprobrium down on her that “by 1954, Nin believed the entire publishing industry saw her as a joke.” She had good reason to think so.

Miller’s notoriously censored books won him cult literary status, and inspired the Beats, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and many more hedonistic male writers seeking to turn their lives into art. Nin’s equally explicit work was met, she lamented, “with indifference, with insults.” Critics either ignored her novels, several of them self-published, or dismissed them as vulgar, artless, and worse. One headline, Doyle notes, called Nin “a monster of self-centeredness whose artistic pretentions now seem grotesque.”

All of that changed when Nin published the first volume of her diary in 1966. Thereafter, she achieved global fame as a feminist icon, and the next ten years saw the publication of an additional six volumes of her journals, then several more excerpts after her death in 1977. Most notably, Henry and June appeared in 1986 (subsequently made into a film by Philip Kaufman), a book which—in conjunction with the publication of her and Miller’s letters the following year—further added to the mythology of the two passionately erotic writers.

Nin had kept her diaries religiously since age 11, and has become known as “modernity’s most prolific and perceptive diarist,” writes Maria Popova, a distinction that has led to a tremendous resurgence in pop culture popularity in our time, when well-crafted self-revelation is de rigeur for artists, activists, online personalities, and aspirants of all kinds. Henry Miller is now “a marginalized and largely forgotten American writer” (or so claims his biographer Arthur Hoyle), and Nin has become a “patron saint of social media,” writes Doyle, a “proto-Lena-Dunham.” Pithy quotations from her diaries—properly credited or not—constantly circulate on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter.

A new generation just discovering Anaïs Nin can access her work in any number of ways—from hip, meme-heavy Tumblr accounts like Fuck Yeah Anais Nin to more formal online venues like the Anais Nin Blog, which aggregates biographies, podcasts, scholarship, bibliographies, controversies, and anything else one might want to know about the author. Anaïs Nin fans can also hear the author herself read from her famous diary in the audio here. At the top of the post, hear Nin’s reading, recorded in ’66, the year of the first volume’s publication. The complete recording runs about 60 minutes.

After the acclaim of Nin’s diaries, and the celebrity she enjoyed in her last decade, her reputation once again suffered, posthumously, as biographers and critics savaged her life and work in moralistic torrents of what would today be called “slut-shaming.” But Nin is now once again rightly revered as a writer fully dedicated to the art, no matter the reception or the audience. The astonishing stream of words that flowed from her, recording every detail of her experiences, “seems nothing less than phenomenal,” wrote Noel Young of Nin’s nonstop letter writing. When it came to the detailed, insightful, and acutely philosophical recording of her life, “the act of writing may have even surpassed the act of living.”

Henry Miller Makes a List of “The 100 Books That Influenced Me Most”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The British Library Digitizes 300 Literary Treasures from 20th Century Authors: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce & More

in Books, Letters, Literature | May 31st, 2016

As a young college student, I spent hours wandering through my university’s library, looking in a state of awe at the number of books contained therein by writers whose names I knew or who seemed vaguely familiar, and by hundreds, thousands, more I’d never heard of. Always content to immerse myself in secluded corners for days on end with a good book, I couldn’t have felt more at home.

The internet was in its infancy, and my online life at the time consisted of awkward, plain-text emails sent once or twice a week and the occasional clunky, slow-loading website, promising much but delivering little. Excitable futurists made extravagant predictions about how hypertext and interactivity would revolutionize the book. These seemed like intriguing but unnecessary solutions in search of a problem.

To the bookish, the book is a perfected technology that cannot be improved upon except by the publishing of more books. While interactive texts—with linked annotations, biographies, historical precis, critical essays, and the like—have much enhanced life for students, they have not in any way improved upon the simple act of reading for pleasure and edification—an activity, wrote Virginia Woolf, requiring nothing more than “the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment.”

Though Woolf would likely have been unimpressed with all that talk of hypertextual innovation, I imagine she would have marveled at the online world for offering something to the reader we have never had until the past couple decades: free and instant access to thousands of books, from literary classics to biographies to histories to poetry—all genres upon which Woolf offered advice about how to read on their own terms. Without the anxious admissions process and costly tuition, anyone with a computer now has access to a significant portion of the average college library.

And now anyone with a computer has access to a significant portion of the British Library’s rare collections as well, thanks to the venerable institution’s new online collection: “Discovering Literature: 20th Century.”

Readers of our site will know of Open Culture’s affinity for 20th century modernist literature, like that of Virginia Woolf, and for the dystopian fiction of George Orwell. These authors and greats of more recent vintage are all well-represented in the British Library collection. You’ll find such treasures as a scanned first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, first American edition of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and first edition of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These are just a few of the classic novels available in the “over 300 treasures” of the collection, writes the British Library.

The online library offers a paradise for readers, certainly. And also a heaven for scholars. Included among the rare first editions and critical essays and interviews on the site’s main page are “online for the first time… literary drafts… notebooks, letters, diaries, newspapers and photographs from Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes, Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi among others.”

Some incredible highlights include:

And as if all this—and so many more 20th century literary treasures—weren’t enough, the collection also tucks in some wonderful artifacts from previous eras, such as a collection of manuscript poems by John Keats, including the Odes and Robert Burton’s encyclopedic 1628 study of depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

“Until now,” says Anna Lobbenberg, the Library’s Digital Programmes Manager, “these treasures could only be viewed in the British Library Reading Rooms or on display in exhibitions—now Discovery Literature: 20th Century will bring these items to anyone in the world with an internet connection.” It truly is, for the lover of books, a brave new world (a book whose 1932 original dust jacket you can see here).

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Recordings: World & Classical Music, Interviews, Nature Sounds & More

Virginia Woolf Offers Gentle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hunter S. Thompson Writes a Blistering, Over-the-Top Letter to Anthony Burgess (1973)

in Letters | May 24th, 2016

We know Anthony Burgess for having written A Clockwork Orange, but in total, according to Shaun Usher’s More Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (a book based on the well-known blog), he “published 33 novels, 25 nonfiction titles, produced poetry, short stories and screenplays, composed three symphonies, wrote hundreds of musical pieces, and spoke nine languages fluently.” Yet even such a “prolific, versatile, and highly intelligent” man of letters faces writer’s block now and again.

Take the Rolling Stone thinkpiece Burgess couldn’t manage to write in 1973. Conceding defeat — “things are hell here,” he wrote of his life in Rome at the time — he offered the magazine “a 50,000-word novella I’ve just finished, all about the condition humaine, etc.” in its place. Surely his editor would understand? Alas, unluckily for Burgess, his editor turned out to be one Hunter S. Thompson, who fired back the characteristically blunt but eloquently vitriolic reply you see here:

Dear Mr. Burgess,

Herr Wenner has forwarded your useless letter from Rome to the National Affairs Desk for my examination and/or reply.

Unfortunately, we have no International Gibberish Desk, or it would have ended up there.

What kind of lame, half-mad bullshit are you trying to sneak over on us? When Rolling Stone asks for “a thinkpiece”, goddamnit, we want a fucking Thinkpiece… and don’t try to weasel out with any of your limey bullshit about a “50,000 word novella about the condition humaine, etc…”

Do you take us for a gang of brainless lizards? Rich hoodlums? Dilettante thugs?

You lazy cocksucker. I want that Thinkpiece on my desk by Labor Day. And I want it ready for press. The time has come & gone when cheapjack scum like you can get away with the kind of scams you got rich from in the past.

Get your worthless ass out of the piazza and back to the typewriter. Your type is a dime a dozen around here, Burgess, and I’m fucked if I’m going to stand for it any longer.

Sincerely,

Hunter S Thompson

“The desired thinkpiece never appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone,” writes the International Anthony Burgess Foundation’s Graham Foster, “but the essay referred to in these letters, ‘The Clockwork Condition’, was eventually published in the New Yorker in 2012.” In it, Burgess recalls the origins of his best-known novel and considers the causes of the societal conformity he took as one of his themes, arriving at the Orwellian notion that “the burden of making one’s own choices is, for many people, intolerable. To be tied to the necessity of deciding for oneself is to be a slave to one’s will.”

That goes for “where to eat, whom to vote for, what to wear” — and, of course, for what to write a thinkpiece about as well as how to write it. “It is easier to be told,” Burgess writes. “Smoke Hale — ninety per cent less tar; read this novel, seventy-five weeks on the best-seller list; don’t see that movie, it’s artsy-shmartsy.” He even remembers, with a certain fondness, his time in the army: “At first I resented the discipline, the removal of even minimal liberty,” but “soon my reduction to a piece of clockwork began to please me, soothe me.” Fair to say, though, that no matter how demanding the officers above him, the experience didn’t prepare Burgess for a superior like Thompson.

via More Letters of Note and Esquire

Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent

Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ballsy & Hilarious Job Application Letter (1958)

Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A Complete Archive of Vincent van Gogh’s Letters: Beautifully Illustrated and Fully Annotated

in Art, Letters | April 6th, 2016

First published in three volumes in 1914, only 24 years after his death, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh have captivated lovers of his painting for over a century for the insights they offer into his creative bliss and anguish. They have also long been accorded the status of literature. “There is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh,” wrote W.H. Auden, “which I do not find fascinating.”

That first published collection consisted only of the painter’s 651 letters to his younger brother, Theo, who died six months after Vincent. Compiled and published by Theo’s wife, Johanna, Van Gogh’s correspondence became instrumental in spreading his fame as both an artist and as a chronicler of deep emotional experiences and religious and philosophical convictions.

Now available in a six-volume scholarly collection of 819 letters Vincent wrote to Theo and various family members and friends—as well as 83 letters he received—the full correspondence shows us a man who “could write very expressively and had a powerful ability to evoke a scene or landscape with well-chosen words.” So write the Van Gogh Museum, who also host all of those letters online, with thoroughly annotated English translations, manuscript facsimiles, and more. The collection dates from 1872—with a few mundane notes written to Theo—to Van Gogh’s last letter to his brother in July of 1890. “I’d really like to write to you about many things,” Vincent begins in that final communication, “but sense the pointlessness of it.” He ends the letter with an equally ominous sentiment: “Ah well, I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it.”

In-between these very personal windows onto Van Gogh’s state of mind, we see the progression of his career. Early letters contain much discussion between him and Theo about the business of art (Vincent worked as an art dealer between 1869 and 1876). Endless money worries preoccupy the bulk of Vincent’s letters to his family. And there are later letters between Vincent and Paul Gaugin and painter Emile Bernard, almost exclusively about technique. Since he was “not in a dependent position” with artist friends as he was with family, in the few letters he exchanged with his peers, points out the Van Gogh Museum, “the sole focus was on art.”

And as you can see here, Van Gogh would not only “evoke a scene or landscape” with words, but also with many dozens of illustrations. Many are sketches for paintings in progress, some quick observations and rapid portraits, and some fully-composed scenes. Van Gogh’s sketches “basically served one purpose, which was to give the recipient an idea of something that he was working on or had finished.” (See the sketch of his room in an 1888 letter to Gauguin at the top of the post.) In early letters to Theo, the sketches—which Vincent called “scratches”—also served to convince his younger brother and patron of his commitment and to demonstrate his progress. You can peruse all of the letters at your leisure here. Click on “With Sketches” to see the letters featuring illustrations.

And for much more context on the history of Van Gogh’s correspondence, see the Van Gogh Museum’s site for biographical information, essays on Van Gogh’s many themes, his rhetorical style, and the state and appearance of the manuscripts.

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The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Download Beautiful Free Vintage Easter Cards from the New York Public Library

in Art, Design, Letters, Life | March 25th, 2016

‘Tis the season when bunnies temporarily upend cats as rulers of the Internet.

There are scores of vintage snapshots in which innocent children are passively menaced by hideous, full body bunny costumes—hopefully an inaccurate reflection of the adults encased therein…

“Medieval rabbits that hate Easter and want to kill you”…

Some edible DIY fails…

And mercifully, a bit of sweet nostalgia from the New York Public Library, who is making its robust collection of Easter greetings available for free download.

Each card comes with publication information. Images of the flip sides reveal that the sender often considered the publishers’ preprinted sentiments correspondence enough. (It’s something of a relief to realize that social media did not invent this kind of shorthand.)