POSTSCRIPT: David Foster Wallace Writes to Don DeLillo

Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

 

Like a prose index of cultural references, this postcard from David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo makes “Wish you were here!” postcards seem like huge wastes, void as they are of information and character.

Among the many curiosities of this correspondence: “No offense intended” by the card’s image (a book cover from Sheldon Lord’s A Woman Must Love), the mention of Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece on William Gaddis, the brick shithouse of a palm tree, and a request to eyeball DeLillo’s “new novel” (Cosmopolis?). So many of the sentences create space for wondering what more there is to know.

Transcript:

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POSTSCRIPT: A Love Letter from Fridtjof Nansen

Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

For Valentine’s Day, a love letter written by Fridtjof Nansen, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his help in rehabilitating and resettling hundreds of thousands of World War One refugees. The object of his affection, the writer Brenda Ueland, lived in New York City until 1930. She met Nansen there in 1929, just about one year before he died. He was 67; she was 37.

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POSTSCRIPT: A letter from Samuel Morse

Each month in Postscript, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

 

With our easy access to instant messenger and video chat, it’s hard to imagine a time when communicating by telephone was a big deal. Try imagining even further back, before the telephone, when letters sent the news, and Samuel Morse had yet to “press” Government to support his invention, an electrical telegraph system.

He was making a living as a painter and a painting teacher, having by then studied and the Royal Academy and completed his masterpiece, the Dying Hercules. According to the story, Morse was in New York, commissioned to paint a marquis, when he learned his wife was gravely ill. Though he immediately traveled home to be with her, he was too late; she had already been buried. Morse was always tinkering with electricity and inventions, but it may have been grief that spurred his obsessive interest in rapid long distance communication.

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POSTSCRIPT: A Letter from Groucho Marx

Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

 

One day in 1961, Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx (whose famous wit is evidenced in quips like, “A man’s only as old as the woman he feels,” and, “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”) received a portrait request from Thomas Stearns “T.S.” Eliot (a man whom, though not known for his sense of humor, many consider to be the most important English-language poet in the 20th Century). Groucho was understandably surprised, but game, and sent the photograph of himself along with a request for one of T.S.

The letter that follows is Groucho’s response to T.S. after having received his portrait in return:

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POSTSCRIPT: A Letter from Edward Gorey

Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

 

This month’s featured letter comes from Edward Gorey to his longtime friend and collaborator Peter F. Neumeyer. Gorey penned the note just a few months after Gorey had been assigned to illustrate Neumeyer’s upcoming book, Donald and The…

The transcript:

2.ii.69

I’m all right (this is only sepia ink, not blood), but I’m so distracted from?/by? drawing that I just can’t cope with anything else for the present, however long that is.

O the horror of it all . . . . (I think this is a shade more poetic than ‘Oh, the . . . . etc.’)

The Penguin Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the great Dismal Works.

Excuse handwriting.

Yr friend, E.G.

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POSTSCRIPT: A letter from J.D. Salinger


Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

 

It’s hard to grow up in America and not read or at least hear about The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s first and most famous novel, published in 1951. The book was immediately popular and still sells over 250,000 copies per year.

My last post featured a letter by Harper Lee, another author who recoiled from fame, but there is a marked difference in tone between her letter and Salinger’s (featured here, a note to his maid, Mary).

The note, dated March 12, 1989, reads:

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POSTSCRIPT: A Letter from Harper Lee

Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

In 1960, J. B. Lippincott Company published Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Though the book sold widely, won the Pulitzer Prize, and became a modern American classic, it is the only novel Lee ever published.

Tracy Kyser, a high school history teacher from Enterprise, AL, recently found this letter, along with two others, at an estate sale in Elba, AL, 100 miles from Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, AL. Lee responded to Mrs. L.H. Hudson, a member of a Daughters of the Confederacy book club, “just days after the publication,” Kyser said. “This [letter] was written a long time before [Lee] won the Pulitzer Prize, a long time before the movie was made.”

In the letter, Lee addresses the question about where the novel is set, in the fictional Maycomb County: “The only answer I can give you is that Maycomb County is in my heart and the Landing is in my imagination. If, in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I persuaded you that those places are real, that means I have succeeded in my profession, which is writing fiction.” Then, she playfully drew a map.

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