Quote of the Day (Cynthia Ozick, on Letters as Literary Plot Devices)

“Letters, in our common understanding, are not meant to be fiction, or jokes, or games, or tricks. They are not meant to compete with storytelling, and if they do, if they are dragooned into real life, they become conflated with conspiracy. Yet without letters, what would become of the crux of so many novels and plays? Of literature itself? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sets out with a series of letters; more letters fever it forward. Had Mr. Darcy not hand-delivered his letter to Elizabeth Bennet, she—who could brook neither fools nor snobs—might have lived unwed. If Romeo had read Friar Laurence’s letter, he and Juliet would have averted their misconstrued deaths. Acclaimed eighteenth-century epistolary novels—Pamela, Fanny Hill, Clarissa—could not have come into being, at least not in their chosen form; nor could Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Bellow’s Herzog. If not for a letter to his aunt, Marlow, the protagonist of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, would have been obliged to discover another contrivance to introduce his journey up the Congo. And what of the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office?”— American short story writer, novelist, and essayist Cynthia Ozick, “Voices from the Dead Letter Office: On the Epistolary Life,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2025

Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on Fame and ‘The Enthusiasms of Younger Men’)

“Ah the tears of things, incidentally…I've all these two days spent filing old letters, taking them out of old envelopes, clipping the pages together, putting them away… hundreds of old letters from Allen [Ginsberg], [William] Burroughs, [Neal] Cassady, enuf to make you cry the enthusiasms of younger men… how bleak we become. And fame kills all. Someday 'The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac' will make America cry.

“Old letters starting ‘Cher, Cher Jean…’ etc. And O all the youngish preoccupations!

“Cassady’s letters are wildly beautiful and full of Irish Celtic verbal zing. Burrough’s old letters contain the same dry humor, like ‘H.C. is sailing away in a boat with a sail to match his blond hair. Enough to make a man spew.’”—American novelist Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), letter to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, May 25, 1961, in Jack Kerouac Selected Letters: Volume 2, 1957-1969, edited by Ann Charters (1999)

It was only four years since his On the Road had become the fictional touchstone of the Beats, but in his letter to Ferlinghetti 60 years ago today, Jack Kerouac was already sounding less “beato” (the Italian for “beatific,” his sense of the West Coast literary movement) than beaten.  

The exhilaration of his recent move to Orlando, Fla., had dissipated, and he was now worrying about his mother’s declining health and grousing about left-wing utopianism that he regarded as insufficiently critical of Soviet totalitarianism and inimical to his beliefs as a self-described “Catholic conservative.” (On “Peace Marchers” recently in the news, he grumbled, “I think they should now endeavor to get permission from the Soviet government to march in Russia in the name of the same peace plea.”)

His death from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking was still eight years off, but Kerouac was even now contemplating posterity. He was lamenting the lost “enthusiasms” of him and his companions, the complications of immense success (“fame kills all”), and what time had undone.

But he was also thinking of restoration—of how preserving his correspondence would enable a deeper, kinder appreciation of his circle in all their humor and humanity.

To a large extent, Kerouac’s faith in these letters was justified. They could not arrest his inexorable physical and creative decline, but they have played their part in the more generous consideration of his early work that has occurred in the last few decades. Moveover, they allow readers to see, without the filter of a biographer, the novelist in all the complications and salvific compassion that governed his life.

Or, as he wrote in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, “One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”

Quote of the Day (John Keats, on Failure)

“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”—Poet John Keats, letter to publisher James Hessey, October 9, 1818, in The Letters of  John Keats: Complete Revised Edition with a Portrait Not Published in Previous Editions and Twenty-Four Contemporary Views of Places Visited by Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman (1895)

Quote of the Day (Bernard Shaw, on True Adoration of a Woman)

“I hope you have lost your good looks; for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No: give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me come out strong."—Playwright George Bernard Shaw, letter to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence, edited by Alan Dent (1952)

Quote of the Day (John Keats, Expressing Skepticism About His Calling)

"I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think poetry is a mere Jack-o-Lantern to whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance.”—Poet John Keats, in a letter to friend Benjamin Bailey, March 13, 1818, from The Letters of John Keats: Complete Revised Edition, edited by H.Buxton Forman (1895)

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on Sermons)

“It is easy for any child to pick out the faults in the sermon on his way home from Church every Sunday. It is impossible for him to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his own lack of strength, give up his life in the service of God’s people, however bumblingly he may go about it.”—American novelist-short-story writer Flannery O’Connor (19251964), letter to Cecil Dawkins, December 9, 1958, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)