However, since your letter indicates an intention to contribute a floral offering of some kind we suggest that in view of the many unsettled obligations of the author and his numerous widows and dependents that you make your testimonial, however slight, in cash. As far as at present Mr. Dreiser left seventy-nine widows and three hundred and fifteen children, all destitute. These need to be looked after in some way and in consequence a sub-committee of the Southern California Authors’ League has been appointed to gather such means as it can. Thus far seven dollars and eighty-three cents have been acquired but the sub-committee is in hopes that more will be forthcoming shortly. Anything that you have to offer will be gratefully received. All sums contributed are immediately divided pro rata, each child and widow counting as one.
Respy.,
The Theodore Dreiser’s Widows and Orphans Relief
and Aid Association.
Per Henry Van Dyke, Sec’y
Stuart P. Sherman, Treas.
Here’s another waggish letter from Mencken to Dreiser:
Dear Sir:
Mr. Mencken requests me to inform you that he is quite ignorant of the matters to which you refer. He further instructs me to ask you to kindly refrain from pestering him with a long and vain correspondence. He is engaged at the moment upon patriotic work which takes his whole time, and he has no leisure to fool with the bughousery of the literati.
Having no more to say, I will now close.
Very sincerely yours,
Ferdinand Balderdash
Captain, 16th U.S. Secret Service
Carl Sandburg
IN 1918, SAM T. HUGHES, the editor-in-chief of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, wanted to send poet Carl Sandburg (then a journalist) to Stockholm to become a European correspondent. Difficulties arose when the passport officers wanted to know precisely why Sandburg had been selected for this position. Sandburg sent Hughes the following letter, which gives his answer to the officers’ question:
Chicago
July 23, 1918
Dear Sam:
Passport authorities want a statement from you why [you’re sending] me to Stockholm. Recite for them that I am 40 years of age, was born in Galesburg, Ill., and have lived all my life in the United States, except the time for an expedition to Porto Rico in 1898 as an enlisted soldier with the Sixth Illinois volunteers, that I am a newspaper man and for the past six years have been continuously in active newspaper work in Chicago: that I am leaving a position as editorial writer on the Chicago Daily News, the world’s largest afternoon newspaper, to go to Stockholm for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, which serves [320] newspapers with news stories and descriptive articles and has a circulation going to 4,500,000 subscribers, being the most extensive service of its kind in the world. Tell them I have cooperated actively with the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, which is the loyalty legion of the American Federation of Labor, and that the alliance gave wide circulation to my war poem, “The Four Brothers.” Make me important as hell. Make it look as though there ought to be brass bands and girls in white dresses strewing flowers on my pathway to the steamboat slip.
… I go to Galesburg, Ill., this afternoon to get my mother to swear I was born when I was. They might take a week by mail, for such an affidavit. In Thursday’s morning mail I expect your statement which with birth affidavit, will go forward with application for passport. The passport will then be mailed to any point I designate.…
I figure on leaving the Daily News Wednesday of next week. Mr. [Charles] Dennis, the managing editor, said I was “specially fitted for the Stockholm post” and Julian Mason of the Evening Post was tickled. It seems to me I’ve got to hunt up some sort of live copy and stories or some good friends will be sore. My hunch is that I will find several Big Stories.
This letter is terribly personal. But so is getting a passport. They want to know every mole and scar on a guy’s frame. And he has to go get mugged and hand in three pictures of what kind of a pickpocket he looks like.
Sincerely,
C.S.
Sandburg wrote the following letter, in 1927, to the editor of Century Magazine about some articles they had published on his folk-singing concerts.
To the Editor:—
Would you kindly correct the statement published a number of times that in the song-offering in my recital-concerts I employ a banjo?
The instrument used is one with less repercussion, and more intimations of silence, than a banjo.
Sometimes when the strings of it are thrummed one has to listen twice to find the chords and melody.
The box of the instrument is entirely of wood, with a cunning of construction having had centuries of study, rehearsal, and try-out by Italians, Spaniards, and the same Arabians who hunted up the Arabic numerals.
At music stores and pawn shops the instrument is called a guitar, a GUITAR.
The banjo is meant for jigs, buck and wing dances, attack, surprise, riot and rout. The guitar is intended for serenades, croons, for retreat, retirement, fadeaways.
I thank you.
Carl Sandburg
P. G. Wodehouse
IN 1931, P. G. WODEHOUSE was a guest of the estimable Citizen Hearst. Stories about the bizarre behavior of the multimillionaire abounded throughout his career, and Wodehouse added to the heap. He wrote to his friend William Townend:
February 25, 1931
Dear Bill:
Since I last wrote, I have been spending a week at Hearst’s ranch. He owns 400,000 acres, more than the whole of Long Island.…
Meals take place in an enormous room hung with banners, and are served at a long table, with Hearst sitting in the middle on one side and Marion Davies in the middle on the other. The longer you’re there, the further you get from the middle. I sat on Marion’s right the first night, then found myself getting edged further and further away, till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it time to leave. Another day and I should have been feeding on the floor.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
WHEN HE WAS a mere twenty-three, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the following unorthodox letter of inquiry to an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. It was 1919, the heyday of Scribner’s Magazine, a literary review.
Dear Mr. Bridges:
This is a query. I have a project. It is a work of about 20,000 words and more on the order of a novel than like these stories I’ve been doing. But it’s the sort of thing that will require a full month’s work and as The New Republic, Scribner’s, and possibly the Atlantic Monthly are the only magazines that would publish it I don’t want to start until you assure me that there’s nothing in the project which seems to bar it from Scribner’s if it be sufficiently interesting and well done.
It is a literary forgery purporting to be selections from the notebook of a man who is a complete literary radical.…
It will be in turns cynical, ingenuous, life-saturated, critical, and bitter. It will be racy and startling with opinions and personalities.…
Of course you can’t possibly commit yourself until you’ve seen it but as I say I’d want to know before I start if a work of that nature would be intrinsically hostile to the policy of Scribner’s Magazine.…
Fitzgerald and his good friend, writer Andrew Turnbull, tried to outdo each other in a long stream of correspondence by using increasingly obscure Shakespearean words. Abruptly, Fitzgerald turned the tables and wrote “Andronio” the following letter, proffering advice in the crassest American slang he could muster:
August 18, 1932
Dear Andronio:
Upon mature consideration I advise you to go no farther with your vocabulary. If you have a lot of words they will become like some muscles you have developed that you are compelled to use, and you must use this one in expressing yourself or in criticizing others. It is hard to say who will punish you the most for this, the dumb people who don’t know what you are talking about or the learned ones who do. But wallop you they will and you will be forced to confine yourself to p
en and paper.
Then you will be a writer and may God have mercy on your soul.
No! A thousand times no! Far, far better confine yourself to a few simple expressions in life, the ones that served billions upon countless billions of our forefathers and still serve admirably all but a tiny handful of those at present clinging to the earth’s crust. Here are the only expressions you need:
“Yeah”
“Naw”
“Gimme de meat”
and you need at least one good bark (we all need one good bark) such as:
“I’ll knock your back teeth down your throat!”
So forget all that has hitherto attracted you in our complicated system of grunts and go back to those fundamental ones that have stood the test of time.
With warm regards to you all,
Scott F.
Fitzgerald once—more than once—exploded in a rage at a party. In this case, it was a tea party given by a Mrs. Bayard Turnbull in May 1934. We can only guess what a Mrs. Perce said at the gathering that so enraged Fitzgerald, but here is his letter of apology to his hostess:
Dear Margaret:
I know it was very annoying for me to have lost my temper in public and I want to apologize to you both, for the discomfort that I know I gave you. There are certain subjects that simply do not belong to an afternoon tea and, while I still think that Mrs. Perce’s arguments were almost maddening enough to justify homicide, I appreciate that it was no role of mine to intrude my intensity of feeling upon a group who had expected a quiet tea party.
Ever yours faithfully,
Scott Fitzgerald
During his Hollywood years, Fitzgerald wrote the following peculiar letter to his landlady:
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
July 29, 1940
Dear Mrs. Neuville:
I thought the other day that a large rat had managed to insert itself into the plaster above my bedroom and workroom. I was, however, surprised that it apparently slept at night and worked in the day, causing its greatest din around high noon.
However yesterday, much to my surprise, I deduced from the sounds it emitted that it was a dog, or rather several dogs, and evidently training for a race, for they ran round and round the tin roof. Now I don’t know how these greyhounds climbed up the wall but I know dog racing is against the law of California—so I thought you’d like to know. Beneath the arena where these races occur an old and harassed literary man is gradually going mad.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
FROM THEIR MID-TWENTIES, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were good friends, despite the intense contrast in their worldviews and general preferences. By the time both were thirty, they were world-famous for their writing.
In 1925, Hemingway wrote Fitzgerald a jocose letter discussing, in part, their differences:
Burguete, Spain
Dear Scott:
… I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt—haven’t drunk anything but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably [be] an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the away from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lived [on] the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.…
Yours,
Ernest
Hemingway’s career as a writer was riddled with dry spells. Here’s how he turned down his friend Thomas Shevlin’s invitation to participate in a fishing tournament after the muse came through for him:
Dear Tommy:
It’s so hard to write this that I’ve been trying to do it for five days and haven’t been able to.
Listen, kid, I can’t come and fish on your team in the tournament. I know that is ratting out and I tell you as soon as possible so that you will be able to get another fisherman.
This is how it is. I went to Cuba intending to write three stories. I wrote the first one and it was good. Then I started on the second one and before I knew it I had fifteen thousand words done and was going better than I have gone since Farewell To Arms and I knew it was a novel.
So there it is. I can’t be a sportsman and write a novel at the same time. I’ve had such stinko luck on fish that it’s probably an asset for you not to have me. But I would have loved to fish with you and with Hugo.
Yours always,
Papa
Writers in Hollywood
THE FAMOUS INCURSION of writers in Hollywood began as soon as sound films caught on. A trail of funny letters also began.
Here’s a telegram from the early 1920s that writer Herman Mankiewicz (who went on to cowrite Citizen Kane) sent to his friend and fellow writer Ben Hecht:
Will you accept $300 per week to work for Paramount Pictures? All expenses paid. The $300 is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.
Nine years later, Hollywood’s attitude toward writers hadn’t changed. (Some maintain that it remains the same today.) Raymond Chandler wrote the following to Charles Morton, the associate editor of Atlantic Monthly, a month after the magazine had published his exposé of Hollywood and its misuses of writers:
Dear Charles:
I’ve owed you a letter for so damn long that I suppose you wonder whether I’m still alive. So do I, at times. Before I delve into your two letters to see if there are any questions you wanted replies to, let me report that my blast at Hollywood was received here in frozen silence.… My agent was told by the Paramount story editor that it had done me a lot of harm with the producers at Paramount. Charles Brackett, that fading wit, said: “Chandler’s books are not good enough, nor his pictures bad enough, to justify that article.” I wasted a little time trying to figure out what that meant. It seems to mean that the only guy who can speak his mind about Hollywood is either (a) a failure in Hollywood, or (b) a celebrity somewhere else. I would reply to Mr. Brackett that if my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and that if they had been any better, I should not have come.
Eugene O’Neill
“LIGHTHEARTED” is approximately the last word that could be used to describe playwright Eugene O’Neill. Yet that’s the tone of this letter he wrote to a Professor William Lyon Phelps, who had invited him to deliver a lecture:
October 27, 1922
My dear Professor Phelps:
I am very grateful to you for the honor of your invitation but I have never lectured and don’t believe I ever will. Frankly, there is a certain prejudice in my mind against it. It seems to me that authors should neither be seen nor heard outside of their work—(not this one, at any rate, for I’m quite certain my plays act better than I ever could—which is faint praise for them indeed!). So, both from the standpoint of personal
discretion and of Christian charity toward the audience, I feel bound to decline.
But again, all gratitude to you for the honor of selecting me. I appreciate that immensely and regret that I cannot accept.
Alexander Woollcott
CRITIC AND SATIRIST Alexander Woollcott was a most amusing, if often perplexing, fellow. One isn’t sure between which lines to read in this letter to Margaret Mitchell:
Bomoseen, Vt.
August 7, 1936
My dear Miss Mitchell:
I have just finished reading Gone With the Wind and found it completely absorbing. Its narrative has the directness and gusto of Dumas. I enjoyed it enormously. I was almost through it when I said to myself: “God’s nightgown! This must be the Peg Mitchell who wrote me once about the little girl who swallowed a water moccasin and the tall man in the wrinkled nurse’s uniform who thronged the road from Atlanta to Miami.” Is it?
If your royalties have begun to come in, kindly send a large share of them as per the enclosed instructions and oblige
A. Woollcott
Apparently, no venue was too small to escape Woollcott’s attention. And wrath. Here’s a letter he wrote to the Omaha World Herald:
Funny Letters From Famous People Page 7
