Yours Ever Read online

  McCarthy, early on, protests that she is “a frightful correspondent,” but for a reason that actually makes her a good one: she’s “never learned to communicate in a brief style.” There is an amplitude, a long steady narrative drive, to both women’s letters. Only one instance of wounded feelings occurs in the whole quarter-century-long exchange, in 1974, when McCarthy sees Arendt off after a visit and is left to worry: “It was sad to watch you go through the gate at the airport without turning back. Something is happening or has happened to our friendship … The least I can conjecture is that I have got on your nerves.” Arendt’s reply is an immediate, exasperated reassurance: “For heaven’s sake, Mary, stop it, please.” It says something about the authenticity of their connection that a reader is moved by this little blip of misunderstanding, fearful the friendship might come, disastrously, full circle. As it is, their love and letters carried on, the harmonic convergence of a woman Norman Mailer once dubbed our “lit arbiter, our broadsword,” with somebody McCarthy herself described as the only person she had ever watched thinking.

  IN READING THE LETTERS of Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two young African-American women living through the middle of the nineteenth century, one imagines occasions when Addie must have watched Rebecca not just thinking but also setting her mind to act on whatever conclusion she had reached.

  According to Farah Jasmine Griffin, the letters’ editor, Addie Brown (born 1841) and Rebecca Primus (born 1836) may have met when Addie moved to Hartford from Philadelphia sometime in the 1850s and began boarding with the Primus family, whose middle-class members included a clerk, a seamstress and a future portrait painter—Rebecca’s brother, Nelson Primus. The two women write to each other while Addie spends the early part of the Civil War in New York, but the heart of their correspondence comes with Reconstruction, when Addie has returned to Hartford and Rebecca moved to Royal Oak, Maryland, in order to build and run a school for the local black population.

  We have to follow the exchange obliquely. Addie’s letters to Rebecca survive, but those Rebecca wrote directly to her have so far not been discovered. (Since they’re alluded to in Addie’s own letters, Professor Griffin remains hopeful.) It is only through the letters she sends to her own family—letters that almost surely reached Addie’s eyes, too—that we hear her urgent, zealous voice.

  Addie gives us sharp-eyed glimpses of her life as a servant, including her short-lived stay with the family of Reverend Huntington, a Trinity College professor whose wife, Addie knows from the start, will be hard to get along with. Addie does not believe she should have to take Mrs. Huntington’s white son to church—and don’t get her started on the stairs. As she explains to Rebecca just after putting the Huntington children to bed: “yesterday I counted how many times I went up and down before breakfast six time you can judge for yourself there is a hundred & seven steps when it time for me to go to bed my limbs ache like the tooth ache.” Miss Porter’s School soon proves a more congenial place to work: the money is good; Addie is allowed to use the library; and on cold days the girls keep her company in the kitchen. She can’t, alas, say much for their dancing (“not many of them graceful”).

  Addie reports to Rebecca on her efforts toward self-improvement—reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, hearing a speech by Henry Ward Beecher—and she’s not entirely without political opinions: she’d rather see Andrew Johnson shot than impeached. But the letters she sends to Rebecca mostly fizz with gossip and mischief; they’re alive with the natural letter-writer’s lack of proportion. The drama of Aunt Emily’s broken butter dish equals, in length and intensity, a local murder that Addie also describes, and while she won’t lose any sleep over a big meteor shower that’s expected, she loves making a sarcastic report of someone’s unexpected pregnancy: “I heard yesterday a young girl in New Haven went from there go south to teach her health was miserable so her Mother sent for her to come home since her return she present her Mother with a grand child. That is a new method of teaching.”

  One can feel this story being customized for Rebecca, who has herself, after all, gone South to teach, but one can’t imagine the recipient having more than a moment to smile over it (and even then a bit disapprovingly). The pressures facing Rebecca Primus in Royal Oak, vividly enumerated in her letters home, often seem unendurable. The struggle for “something like justice” is conducted amid everything from the underpayment of blacks by “Secesh” employers to a violent “unprovoked assault” on young black men by the “low white fellows in St. Michaels.” Rebecca reassures her family, and herself, with the thought that she is in “the hands of the same Supreme Being that has the charge of us all everywhere.”

  Her focus remains the schoolhouse: finding land for it; getting it built; keeping it running. She will not accept the freedmen’s own excuses for going slowly: “Their invariable plea is we’re all poor, just out of bondage and times are hard with us etc.” With a sarcasm worthy of Addie—who reports to her on the success of a fundraiser for the school back in Hartford—Rebecca mentions her failure to obtain the land. The owner, who at first “gave every reason to believe that we should have it,” has proved to be “a hard-headed old Negro-hating secessionist” who “looks like an angry bulldog in the face—which is his most pleasant facial appearance.”

  Will Rebecca have to bear what Miss Dickson went through a month ago in Trappe? Her colleague was “stoned by white children & repeatedly subjected to insults from white men.” Whatever her fears, Rebecca persists, expressing optimism whenever she sees a reason for it: some trees for the schoolhouse eventually come “from southern rights men, which I think shows they have no real hostile feelings toward the col’d. school.” And once that school is in session, woe betide those who act up in Miss Primus’s class. The pupils generally “behave very well,” she writes on February 23, 1867, “but now & then an evil spirit rises among them, and I introduce different methods of punishment to quell it.”

  Addie hears all of this in letters that Rebecca usually writes on Saturday mornings, compositions she calls a “home weeklie.” Despite her modest protest against the idea, Rebecca must have expected the letters to be passed around outside her immediate family. They would have been read with interest by everyone, but their chronicling aspect would not long have satisfied Addie’s disposition toward intimacy.

  It seems likely that she and Rebecca had had a physical romance in the earliest days of their acquaintance. Certainly Addie’s ardor could still blaze up during her friend’s distant, preoccupying mission in Maryland. “O why have you left me alone no one to love me an give me a fond imbrace how I long for yours,” she laments in an unpunctuated rush during November 1865, not long after Rebecca’s departure from Hartford. Addie signs herself “your loving Affectionate Adopted Sister” and makes a point of telling Rebecca that she rereads her letters and appreciates their smell, even if they can never substitute for her presence. She may even be trying to provoke Rebecca’s jealousy when she mentions another servant girl at Miss Porter’s: “She is a fine looking girl, quite tall. She take hold of my hands and look at me and hug me so tight she hurt me.” And yet, for all this, Addie remains a cheerful realist, amused by and finally receptive to the affections of Mr. Joseph Tines (“I do love him but not fasinated”), whom she will marry, after some hestiation and postponement, in 1868.

  Rebecca worries when she doesn’t hear from Addie, whose letters must have appealed to the softer portions of her own nature, the ones she had to keep armored against all the hostility and danger in Royal Oak. Receiving and writing letters seems generally to have relaxed Rebecca, whether she was getting them from her students (“They are very amusing & in some respects contain very sensible expressions”) or writing them to Jim, the cat she loved back home: “I know you can not be beaten in the whole U.S. Tis too bad poor Major & Kittie Smith had no Thanksgiving, and I don’t believe you gave them a very strong invitation to partake with you.” Rebecca returned to Hartford some time after the school she foun
ded was renamed the Primus Institute. Back in Connecticut, she married, taught Sunday school and lived to be ninety-five. We know as much as we do of her early life, and of Addie Brown’s short one—Addie died at the age of twenty-eight, less than two years after her marriage to Mr. Tines—because Rebecca Primus stood her ground against Royal Oak’s “poor old secesh Post-master.” Late in 1866, he seemed bent on interfering with her mail, and to protect it she wrote to the man’s counterpart in Easton, asking that he “take charge of all my papers & letters hereafter.” Within three months, the Royal Oak postmaster and his wife appeared to learn a lesson; they became “very particular” about this complaining customer who’d taken her business elsewhere. “I suspect they feel the slight,” Rebecca reported to her family back home. “These white people want all the respect shown them by the col’d. people. I give what I rec. & no more.”

  A CENTURY LATER, the kind of frustrated attraction that Addie felt toward Rebecca may have been what made Tennessee Williams find even his close male friendships “less deeply satisfying than those I have had with a few women.” Chief among these female friends was Maria Britneva St. Just, a Russian actress expatriated to England as a baby. Williams met her in 1948, in London, at a party hosted by John Gielgud. “He told me that Chekhov was his favorite playwright,” St. Just later recalled. “He’d never met a live Russian before.” For the next few decades, she and Williams developed the sort of friendship he preferred to call an amitié, a relationship “probably all the deeper because it exists outside and beyond the physical kind of devotion.”

  St. Just once played Blanche DuBois in a New York revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, and in a letter from 1954 about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one hears Williams telling her: “I think a lot of you has gone into the writing of it.” In times to come, St. Just would downplay the comparison of herself and Maggie, but only after drawing attention to it. Over the years, Williams tried to find her work in the theatre; urged her away from self-pity; and reminded her that she at least had two lovely daughters to ease the pain of having been, like him, “so unlucky in love.” In advising her on the “condition” of her depressed, titled husband, Williams let out a typical cackle concerning his own state: “[Peter] is simply the victim of an overpowering mother who wants to make him a helpless dependent. Don’t believe that stuff about hereditary influences affecting the child. Insanity on all 4 sides of my family, and look at me! A model of mental stability if ever there was one.”

  What St. Just does for Williams is listen to his troubles; these include the moods and, eventually, cancer of his lover Frank Merlo (“Must seal this letter at once as Frank is returning from the barber’s”), as well as Williams’s difficulties managing his own terrible glooms. “Of course I have been through periods somewhat like this before, when the sky cracked and fell and brained me,” he writes St. Just in 1957, “but this time I seem less able to struggle out of the debris.” She remains his confidante during what he calls “these nightmare years”—far worse ones would be coming—and Williams counts on her “wonderfully sweet, funny letters” to bring him “back to life and to something closer to sanity.”

  Alas, as with Addie and Rebecca, only his side of the correspondence survives. It’s an irony that besets epistolary relationships: the letters of the disorderly person or the wanderer (Addie changed residences a great deal in her short life) wind up being saved and filed and organized; what’s written by the correspondent with regular habits disappears into the other person’s chaos.

  Or else, who knows? Williams may have jettisoned St. Just’s letters in an angry mood. In 1977, he writes to a third party: “I sometimes suspect this friendship and concern for me is all a myth that she has constructed. However, this is a suspicion that I’d love to dismiss [discuss?] as there’s no one else whom I can look to in times of emotional stress.” Eight months later, he writes to St. Just herself: “I guess that you are the only person whose loyal friendship I have never doubted.”

  Williams insists he’s “not at all clever about people unless they’re people of my own invention,” but his letters are painfully alert to his own and others’ natures. “My heart and my life hang suspended when I don’t have a play,” he declares. A sense of the vocation that was fulfilled early and then cruelly thwarted suffuses the letters, along with an impression of real kindness, that quality for which Blanche could depend only on strangers. Williams is generous with money and sympathy; hopes for the best in return; rarely gets it. He remains inspired by the “brave, patient” heart of his grandfather, the Rev. Dakin, as well as the gently mad and mysterious behavior of his sister, Rose, confined to an asylum and “the greatest person I have ever known.” When, according to the letters’ editor, a reporter in London asks him for his “definition of happiness,” Williams replies with casual brilliance: “Insensitivity, I guess.”

  In 1955, from Key West, he diagnoses Carson McCullers’s troubles with the same mordant tenderness he gives his own. McCullers, whom he called Choppers, is at that point drinking and “dreaming herself away.” Williams has paid for her visit to Florida, but tells Maria: “It is much easier to give money than love. Choppers needs love but I am not the Baa-Baa Black Sheep with three bags full for Choppers. I don’t even have any for the Master or the Dame or the Little Boy Down the Lane … life makes many demands, and these decimal offerings of the heart are never sufficient.”

  When work goes well, he’s too tired to answer letters; when it doesn’t, he’s too depressed to write them. When he finds the sweet spot, he can be surprisingly meticulous, composing rough drafts and making sure, on one occasion, that St. Just knows his shaky handwriting results not from alcohol but the lurchings of a boat. He is happy when she ends an “epistolary hiatus” but declares that “when people have been friends for so long, an unbroken succession of letters is not that important.” It’s something she will need to keep in mind during the 1960s, what Williams called his “stoned age.” As an editorial note reminds the reader: “They were years of few letters, although he kept in constant touch with Maria by phone.” Their written exchange regained frequency in the 1970s, during which we see Williams acknowledging one of modern life’s odd accelerations: “No doubt we’ll be talking before you get this.”

  St. Just sympathizes with the particular nature of Williams’s tormenting decline, a normal falling-off in power that was lethally exacerbated by the refusal of producers and critics even to consider that he might still compose something good. “I feel so deeply what you are going through as an artist,” she writes in a 1974 letter, a rare survival of her side of the correspondence, composed mid-flight on British Airways letterhead: “no one minds trying and being turned down, but not being allowed to try—God!”

  Williams at one point writes that he doesn’t want his complaints to be “a waste of this beautiful stationery,” but how can he avoid mentioning the up-and-coming young man who says to him, “Here I am, a yet-to-be actor with a has-been playwright!” Sometimes angry to the point of despair, he ceases to worry that he’ll embarrass himself. “You’ll think I’m starkers, but, honey, I’ve had it in aces and spades for 10 years,” he writes St. Just from New Orleans in 1972, the year he turns sixty. Soon after, on his way to Japan, he observes that the “venom, the vindictiveness, the betrayals and callousness of this world incline one at times almost to anticipation of the oblivion to come.” Even so, he’d rather close with a bang: “This is not the honk of a dying duck in a thunderstorm, honey, but the howl of an enraged beast at bay!”

  When cries like these come through a telephone, they tend to fall on ears that turn self-protectively deaf. On paper, they are actually harder to ignore, curtain lines that even now hang in the air.

  WITH THEIR occupational inclination toward zingers and backbiting, theatre people often find that the compulsion to entertain, and compete, extends to their letter writing. What they send to friends must be shapely and sharp; in fact, a letter should feel like its own enclosure, the bright on-purpose pr
ose dancing out of the envelope like photos or cash.

  Late in life, Groucho Marx responded to a publisher’s proposal to collect his letters with the following telegram: YOUR LETTER RECEIVED AND PROMPTLY BURNED. I PREFER NOT TO HAVE STRANGERS PRYING INTO MY MAIL. WOULD DISCUSS THIS IN DETAIL BUT MY SECRETARY HAS A DATE IN FIVE MINUTES—WITH ME. Once he relented, a section of the book was called “Friends Abroad.” Its contents show Groucho doing a star turn for each of his correspondents, and all of them trying to top him in his own style.

  In 1959, for example, Groucho informs his friend and collaborator Harry Kurnitz, over in England: “If you will tell me precisely when you are coming to Hollywood, I will arrange a party, something small but select, for your degenerate friends … at the moment, I’m leaving the food up in the air—where I’m sure it will be after you eat it.” Five years later, by then in Paris, Kurnitz reports experiencing a surge of nostalgia for Groucho: “a plastic tear which I carry for just such occasions welled up in my eye.”

  Some of what looks like imitation is actually the real thing, since so many of Groucho’s latter-day correspondents are the screenwriters who helped make him into himself. Two decades after creating dialogue for Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, Arthur Sheekman is still more or less writing it in letters to Groucho: “People ask me if you are as amusing off-screen as on and I—please forgive me—tell them the truth.” Groucho answers Sheekman, also abroad, with the same sort of invitation he gave Kurnitz: “If you ever get back, and would like to have dinner sometime, just say the word and I’ll be at your house …” Like all shrewd entertainers, he professes a wariness of overexposure, even through the mails: “Since you make your living as a writer,” Groucho tells Norman Krasna in March of 1960, “I deliberately have waited two months before answering you. I don’t want to burden you with the Damocles’ sword of a steady correspondence. The next letter you get from me will be three years from now.”