SIX LETTERS
TO ANN BEATTIE
October 29, 1985
Dear Ann,
I’m sorry—extremely sorry—to say that we’re sending back “Another Day.” No one here could recognize these people; they don’t seem to have any connection with real life. The story is written with wonderful clarity and intensity, but the gigantic egos and destructive behavior of your characters are presented so bluntly and coldly that they blot out everything else; no one is left alive, except the victims, and they are almost grotesques, too, because of what has been done to them. It seems to me that fiction of this sort flattens one’s interests in the events and discoveries of a story, because one knows that what comes next will be equally deadly and bitter. Two people here who read the story said that they expected that someone would shoot the dog next.
This sounds as if we’re looking for pleasant fiction or a particular view of life, but I don’t think we are. It may be that you know people who are as horrific and destructive as this and that I don’t, but I still would expect them to be recognizable to me in some intuitive fashion. Many of your stories have been about people who were living a very different life than my own, and thinking and saying things that I didn’t expect or know in advance, but there was an instant and unabashed recognition; they seemed alive and important, and no matter what they said or did, I cared about them. It seems to me that I could even care about Harry and Jo-Beth and Oren and the rest, if I felt that you cared about them too, but that doesn’t come across here.
I don’t know how it has happened that we are so far apart just now in our view of fiction, but I know it will correct itself somehow. I hate to write a letter like this, but it’s probably best if we try to be clear. Whatever you think (and please do think about all this, even if you don’t agree), please keep writing stories and sending them to me. I count on you always, you know.
Love,
TO NANCY FRANKLIN
November 18, 1999
Dear Nancy,
I suppose you know that your great piece about my mother is in the forthcoming Profiles collection, and I suppose further that you’ve already seen the book. I was looking at a copy the other day, and read your KSW Profile all over again, front to back, and was struck again by its great reporting, its thoroughness, its elegant concision, its daring perceptiveness, its fairness, and—well, its love. I think I wrote you a note when it first came out, but I want to say again how much it means to me that you wrote it in the first place, and how happy I am that it’s in a book now, for keeps.
The piece is also a big fat relief for me, because I’ll never have to write one of my own about my mother—or at least not a major, all-points effort like yours. I feel no need to correct or to amplify what you’ve done, because you’ve got so much of KSW into yours, in a way that feels both level and intimate. I’m also pleased in a wise, satisfied way because of your “As an editor, she was maternal, and as a mother she was editorial.” If I’d heard this in 1965, let’s say, I would have saved about $20,000 in psychiatrists’ bills—no, make that $25,000. I would have invested that sum in Xerox, then Microsoft, and I’d be telling you all this right now, this minute, while driving us to the Villa Angellino in Cap Ferrat in my mauve Jaguar XV-I6 two-seater. Pity.
Love again,
TO JOHN HENRY ANGELL
July 16, 2000
Dear John Henry:
Here’s a late, well, I hope not too late, but heartfelt happy birthday to you, my dear—with wishes for a happy, sunny day, happy summer, happy whole year, and many more. I won’t say decade because thinking in those big blocks is sort of gloomy, I’ve found. One always tries to weigh the meaning of those ten-year chunks, and the only answer is mortality, which we knew about before we started. But I think you’re a million miles ahead of where you were ten years ago—I remember you then, of course, and also with joy—and more at home in the world…. There, see what I mean: heavy thinking: I’m sorry.
I wish we could be with you to watch your thirties come up the bay with the tide, but we’ll catch up with you soon. Hope you can find your way back again in August, since there always seems to be a little more time there for us all. Meantime, I’m enclosing a check, as usual, with my love—as usual only more so. Buy a new paddle or something.
I imagine you can pick up a general tone of frazzlement between the lines here. It all comes from [David] Cone—the book, the man, the decline, the money, the late hours, the terrible pitching, the unknown future, the unorderly notes, the passing and often lost ideas, the need to get along with it and the need to get it right, and more. I think he may actually retire at almost any point—or least disappear to another team after some sort of buy-out from the Yankees. It’s killing him that all this is happening in full view, here in the big city. I think it’s his worst dream come true. He seems to pitch a little less well each time, while trying harder, and I think he’s run out of ideas. But his behavior in the face of all this is nothing less than extraordinary, and that alone makes me glad I got into this big, weird mess.
I’m sorry, by the way, to stick this into your birthday letter, but it’s sort of natural, since talking with you is natural to me, and gives me confidence. You have no idea, I think, of the place you have in my thoughts all the time now, and how often I find myself wanting to tell you things, and waiting to hear what you think. It’s one of the great rewards of me being my age and you being yours.
Happy birthday, my dear, and welcome to whatever is coming along for you next. It’s great to have you around.
All my love,
TO WYLIE DAUGHTY *
February 7, 2008
Dear Wylie (if I may):
How very kind of you to think of me! I read your father’s unpublished pages with far more attention to the author, of course, than to The new yorker stuff. I’m always interested in O’Hara, which puts me into an exclusive club of about a hundred thousand. I felt the old and undeserved proprietary affection, and got a kick when I saw that he’d made his hero a Harvard man this time. But Stephen learns and remembers more than anyone at Harvard would have bothered to do—and actually more than anyone except John O’Hara would have. Everyone is here—Andy and Thurber and Lobrano and Sullivan and Ross—along with some made-up lesser figures, but the real presence is the author, burning up the pages once again and pouring the dialogue around like gasoline.
I kept thinking of him writing this, and the noise his typewriter would have made, and got a thrill when I noticed that the ribbon is getting a little pale by the time he gets to the last page.
Thanks again, Wylie, and all the best,
P.S.: Please let me know if this does get published so I can get hold of it again.
TO HERBERT MITGANG
February 17, 2010
Dear Herb:
Thanks for your letter and the kind words. Brief was a skinny slick-paper G.I. magazine published in Hawaii—we used the Honolulu Advertiser presses and distributed around the four million square miles of the Central Pacific by ATC planes. It cost 15 cents per copy and looked sort of like Life. We actually made a small profit in the end but conscientiously drank it all up in a series of magnificent postwar parties. Circulation was around eighteen thousand per week, as I recall it. It started as a small G.I. weekly for the 7th A.F. but I was sent out early in 1944 by the A.A.F. with three other writer-reporter guys to make it better, since they knew that the theater would become huge once the war ended in Europe. It was called Brief because of “briefings”—you know, wartime intelligence distributing. We did O.K., scored some beats, but ran into trouble with an editorial attacking Ernie Pyle (he came late to the Pacific and was only associating with Navy brass, etc.), which came out the day before he was killed on Ie Shima. I remember a guy in my barracks stopping by and saying, “Wake up—you just killed that old man.”
I wrote a lot and had a weekly column, and helped put the thing to bed every week, so I never got to the Marianas or anywhere else. But I liked the job and was pretty good at it. I was in my early twenties.
Glad you’re hanging in there, Herb. I’m still at work here every day but don’t work very long hours, thank God. But I’m way younger than you. I won’t be 90 till September. I’m glad you like The New Yorker.
All best, as ever,
TO RAY SMITH
February 18, 2010
Dear Ray Smith:
Thanks for your letter and thank you in particular for reminding me of Andy White’s thoughts about the Xerox matter. What hurts now, in a time when newspapers and other publications are dying off in such scary numbers, is his sentence, “Not all papers are independent, God knows, but there are always enough of them to provide a core of integrity and an example that others feel obliged to steer by.”
Not so, it turns out, and who can believe that blogs and tweets will fill the gap? I worry about this every day. You and the Gardiner Gazette are the exception, and congratulations to you both.
Yours & best,
* Wylie Daughty is the daughter of John O’Hara.