Yale Bulletin and Calendar

May 7, 2004|Volume 32, Number 29|Two-Week Issue

Edith Wharton is one of the authors whose letters are featured in the exhibit "Writer to Writer."

The letters of literary figures
are featured in Beinecke exhibit

At a time when instant messages (fax, e-mail and online chats) are the norm, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is exploring the art of letter writing in its new exhibition, "Writer to Writer: A Century of American Literary Correspondence, 1850-1950."

The exhibit documents the wealth of history and biography that is captured through the act of writing letters while also demonstrating writers' gifts for humor or instruction. It features handwritten and typed original letters by some 30 American writers to other writers -- be they friend or foe, mentor or student, collaborator or adviser, or admirer.

Emily Kopley '06 of Branford College is the guest curator of the exhibition, which runs through June 12. All of the materials were drawn from the Yale Collection of American Literature.

"Writer to Writer" begins with correspondence among Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. Many of these letters discuss Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance," a critical and satirical account of his experiences at the utopian community Brook Farm. Among the letters included is one written in 1852 by Melville to Hawthorne, in which he writes: "Especially at this day, the volume is welcome, as an antidote to the mooniness of some dreamers -- who are merely dreamers -- Yet who the devil aint [sic] a dreamer?"

In a letter from Emily Dickinson to her aunt, Elizabeth "Libbie" Dickinson Currier, dated April 17, 1886, the author writes of the poor health both experienced. She comments: "Hunt was tinning a Post this Morning, and told us Libbie did'nt feel quite as well as usual and I hav'nt felt quite as well as usual since the Chestnuts were ripe, though it was'nt the Chestnuts fault, but the Crocuses are so martial and the Daffodils to the second Joint, let us join Hands and recover." Both women died within six months.

The exhibition draws on several long correspondences in the Yale collection, among them the letters of Edith Wharton to Henry James. On display is a series of postcards Wharton sent James from a car trip through Italy in the fall of 1911. Some are rhymed:

"Climbing cliffs & fording torrents
Here we are at last in Florence."

In another set of picture postcards on view, Ernest Hemingway reports to Gertrude Stein on the running of the bulls in Spain in 1924.

A rich source of material in the exhibition is the Ezra Pound Papers. The exhibit includes letters to Pound from T.S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, who reportedly received Pound's apology for his anti-Semitism in an interview that took place in 1967.

H.D.'s papers in the library's collection provided a letter from Sigmund Freud in which the psychiatrist asks for the writer's books in order to become better acquainted with the personality of his new patient/pupil.

The exhibition also features several correspondences that document the work of African-American writers. Letters by Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, for instance, discuss Wright's "Native Son" (1940) and Ellison's "Invisible Man" (1952). On the road conducting anthropological research, Zora Neal Hurston reports to Langston Hughes -- her collaborator in magazine projects and later on the play "Mule Bone" -- that his poetry is enthusiastically received in the South.

In many of the letters, authors praise each other's work. William Carlos Williams tells Pound that Louis Zukofsky's mind "is really silky," while Marianne Moore writes to Williams about the force of his poetry: "Trifles pulverize under it." William Faulkner offers praise for Wright's "Native Son."

Not all of the writers featured in the exhibit, however, admired each other. Mark Twain omits all mention of poetry in a letter for Walt Whitman's 70th birthday. Writing to Archibald Macleish, Conrad Aiken notes that Gertrude Stein's orthography and e.e. cummings' typography are -- referring to the Hans Christian Andersen tale -- something like the emperor's new suit. Vladimir Nabokov found it necessary, in 1942, to take Edmund Wilson to task about his insensitivity to Pushkin's Russian metrics, but the two remained good friends. On the back of a 1944 letter, Nabokov (who was a skilled and published lepidopterist as well as the author of "Lolita") sketched an imaginary butterfly and labeled it "papilio bunnyi," alluding to Wilson's childhood nickname "Bunny."

The Beinecke Library exhibition area is open Monday-Thursday, 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. It will be closed on Memorial Day. The library is located at 121 Wall St. For further information, call (203) 432-2964 or visit the library's website at www.library.yale.edu/beinecke.

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