Posterity (17 page)

This morning I rode along the banks for about two miles and came to a point where the canal runs across the river and into a tunnel through a mountain. The bridge that carries the canal is very deep of course and is made of iron—simply an iron trough made like a bridge, and right after the canal crosses the river it flows into the mountain, through a tunnel of course. I thought you would be interested to know about this.

I have a very good horse, a bay which I brought from San Antonio. He has a splendid trot, a nice canter and gallops well when you want him to.

The only thing that was lacking this morning in making my ride a complete joy was that you were not here to go with me. I often wish you were with me when I see beautiful things as I travel around the country. I would also like to have you with me always under all circumstances. I especially miss you at night.

I am just dictating this short note while I am eating breakfast, so good-bye. Write me very often.

C
ARL
S
ANDBURG TO
M
ARGARET
S
ANDBURG

“. . . we are going to go on slowly, quietly,
hand in hand, the three of us, never giving up.”

Carl Sandburg, with his signature lock of straight white hair, wrote in the language of the American vernacular. A poet, historian, and folksinger, he was a man who had faith in the people, the land, the cities, and in the American dream. He was a devoted husband and the father of three daughters, the eldest of whom was diagnosed with epilepsy in the days before there were seizure-suppressing medications. Here, forty-three-year-old Sandburg writes to his ten-year-old daughter, a patient at the Battle Creek Sanatorium.

[Elmhurst, Illinois]
[November 1921]

Dear Margaret:

This is only a little letter from your daddy to say he thinks about you hours and hours and he knows there was never a princess nor a fairy worth so much love. We are starting on a long journey and a hard fight—you and mother and daddy—and we are going to go on slowly, quietly, hand in hand, the three of us, never giving up. And so we are going to win. Slowly, quietly, never giving up, we are going to win.

Daddy

W
ILLIAM
C
ARLOS
W
ILLIAMS TO
W
ILLIAM
E
RIC
W
ILLIAMS

“. . . I had to fight to keep myself as I wanted to be.”

Medicine and literature were a vital combination for William Carlos Williams. “One feeds off the other in a manner of speaking; both seem necessary to me,” he said. A major poet of the twentieth century who strived to establish an American style of verse all its own, Williams was also a physician who, during the course of his medical career, delivered two thousand babies in and around his native Rutherford, New Jersey.

In 1942, he was especially hard at work in his general practice. Most of the younger doctors were off serving in World War II, and Williams knew that “as the younger men go, we older men must do their work—there's no question about that.” At the same time, he was just beginning his epic poem
Paterson
, but it wasn't going well. He felt he was laboring and not writing as confidently as usual. And as a father, he was struggling with the absence of both his children. Paul was on a destroyer patrolling the Atlantic and Bill was a naval medical officer in the Pacific. Here fifty-nine-year-old Williams writes to his son and fellow doctor, twenty-eight-year-old Bill.

Sept. 25, 1942

Dear Bill:

Your letters recently have shown me the changes that are taking place in you, a maturity which I want to salute and acknowledge. Generally speaking, your present experience has been of decided benefit, something you could not achieve, at least not so quickly, in any other way. Part of it has been the enforced separation from any protecting influence I may still have had on you, a very good thing. What you're facing is your world, a world in which I haven't the slightest part. We are now two individuals, two men, closely bound by mutual beliefs and interests but completely independent as to the future. Strangely enough, this separation has brought me much closer to you. I'm glad that early phase is at an end.

That relationship between father and son is one of the toughest things in the world to break down. It seems so natural and it is natural—in fact it's inevitable—but it separates as much as it joins. A man wants to protect his son, wants to teach him the things he, the father, has learned or thinks he has learned. But it's exactly that which a child resents. He wants to know but he wants to know on his own—and the longer the paternal influence lasts the harder it is to break down and the more two individuals who should have much in common are pushed apart. Only a sudden enforced break can get through that one.

But I've sweated over wanting to do and say the right thing concerning you boys. Certain things stick in my mind—I just didn't do the right thing and I suffered for it. Once when you were a little kid some question of veracity came up between you and Elsie, that goofy girl we had here. I should have known that you were just a baby but I lost my temper, insisting that one of you was lying when I should have known, if I had thought for a moment, that it wasn't you. Or if it was, then what the hell anyway? It might have been from fear—no doubt of me. Then one day at the close of Watty's camp in Maine you were in some sort of a canoe race and were about to win when someone quite unfairly cut you out and you cried. I like a God damned fool laughed at you. Why? Just to hide my own embarrassment. You looked at me and said, “It was my only chance to win anything!” I tell you that hurt. I've never forgotten it. Such are a father's inner regrets. Stupid enough. And what in the hell is a parent to do when an older child is tormented by a younger child, finally smears his younger tormentor and then comes up for punishment? I've never solved that one. I've done many more seriously stupid things than those mentioned—but I wanted so hard to give you the best.

On the other hand, when you say you've got so much more in the bank than some of the men you have to deal with, I feel that what we did for you wasn't too bad. The same for what you say about the kitten and the spiders. That you can get the good out of such trivia is a tribute to your mind which I have always respected and which I'm glad to see maintaining itself with distinction in the situation in which you are placed. I don't know what kind of a father I was but in things like that at least something “took” of what I intended and that it wasn't all beside the point.

You say you'd like to see my book of poems. What the hell? Let 'em go. They are things I wrote because to maintain myself in a world much of which I didn't love I had to fight to keep myself as I wanted to be. The poems are me, in much of the faulty perspective in which I have existed in my own sight—and nothing to copy, not for anyone even so much as to admire. I have wanted to link myself up with a traditional art, to feel that I was developing individually it might be, but along with that, developing still in the true evolving tradition of the art. I wonder how much I have succeeded there. I haven't been recognized and I much doubt that my technical influence is good or even adequate.

However, this is just one more instance of the benefits to be gained by breaking entirely with the father-son hook-up. It was logical for you not to have looked at my poems—or only casually to look at them. You had me in my own person too strongly before you to need that added emphasis. You did the right thing and I never cared a damn. Now, separated from me by distance and circumstance, it may after all be permissible for you to look at the poems. Not to do anything more than to enjoy them, man to man, if you can get any enjoyment out of them. I'll send them. I have a gold-edged copy reserved for you, one of the de luxe copies, but I'll not send that. Look, if you care to, at whatever I have done as if you had never known me. That's the only way for a father and son to behave toward each other after the son's majority has been reached. Then, if you still find something to cherish, it will be something worthwhile.

You in your recent letters have shown that you have a style of your own—another testimonial to your own character and a tribute to your parents for not trying, really, to press themselves upon you. You have an interesting prose style that everyone who reads your letters admires. It's really comical. Some say, “A chip off the old block”; others say, “He writes better than you do,” and so it goes. You are entirely different from me in your approach, and yet we are alike in our interests. . . .

They finished insulating the attic today and are putting storm windows all along the front of the house. Better to be prepared for what may happen the coming winter.

Love,
DAD

Both of Williams's sons returned from World War II intact.

W
OODY
G
UTHRIE TO
A
RLO
G
UTHRIE

“. . . all of us when you come right down to it all of us are just every bit as weakened here in
some way or the other . . .”

Stricken with a horrific disease of the nervous system, Woody Guthrie, on a visit home from the hospital, once took his young son, Arlo, out into the backyard alone. He was hardly able to hold his guitar anymore, but he knew the random, jerky movements and mental imbalance caused by Huntington's chorea would only grow worse. There wasn't much time left and the “Father of Folk Music,” the writer of more than a thousand songs for the people, wanted to be sure his son knew and would never forget the last verses of “This Land Is Your Land.” It begins with the “ribbon of highway,” the “endless skyway,” and the “sparkling sands of her diamond deserts,” but Woody Guthrie feared the world would forget his ending, and his original intent.

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office I saw my people—
As they stood there hungry, I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me.

Guthrie was a man who knew hardship. His early childhood was spent in Dust Bowl Oklahoma, where his father's business went bankrupt, his sister was killed in a freak explosion, and his mother was institutionalized with the same hereditary disease with which Guthrie himself was later afflicted. He had lived in poverty, had troubles with alcohol, three times failed at marriage, and suffered the death of his four-year-old daughter, Cathy. And yet there was always an enduring optimism to Woody Guthrie and his work. To the wage earner, to the laborer, and to the ordinary American he said, “I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work.”

Here forty-four-year-old Woody Guthrie writes from a state institution to nine-year-old Arlo, who was born with a weak eye. The letter was written in September. By December Guthrie had sent his last piece of correspondence. He survived in the hospital for another eleven years, suffering the rampages of the disease that eventually rendered him immobile, unable to speak, read, or use his hands.

Deary Arlo Davy

Of course now concerning you and that weakerly nearly blinded eye of yours all that I or all that anybody cood tell you is for you just to pray your very head off for god your heavenly father your maker and your creator to heal you to heal you the same as I do pray every minnit here for god to heal me of all my bad wrongs I've done in my lifetime for god to heal me of all my sicknesses I have here just as bad as you have there god hits us all god makes us all every living man and woman among us all just every bit as baddy sick as you are with your weakedy blinded eye you're not the only only one god has knocked down sick with your weaky eye all of us when you come right down to it all of us are just every bit as weakened here in some way or the other maybe lots lots blindeyer sicker weaklyer than you are no person living is ever perfect we are all as weakledy sickedy as you are so don't feel like you're the only sicky one here on god's earth Don't whine to god Don't even complain one little bitsy word back to god Be silent Be quiet Be thankyful Be faithyful Be grateful Be gaylyful Be Joydyful Be thankenful to god for giving you your very very life on gods earthy here anyhow I do lovey you all just the same if you are halfways blind halfways dead I do love you all the same no matter how good nor how bad you do or you don't do in all your sports in alla your schools in alla your activities in alla your colleges in alla your jobs in alla your works in alla your labors goody baddy up or down I love you all the very same Richy poory I love you all the very samey sicker Well I love you just the very same in and out I love you all the very very same I lovey lovey lovey you Arlo Davy Arlo Barlow just because you're my boy because you're my son because you're my own pore 1⁄2ways blinded humanly flesh all my humanky fleshedy folkes I see around me here are all of us so blinded we have only one wee smallyful hope to be cured one little halffa chancey to all or any of us all to be wholy and permantly healer a here If we all love and all pray all just believey in god like Jesus died to tell us to tell you

lovey me
daddy Woody Guthrie

September 1956
Ward forty
Graystone Park N.J.

H
UME
C
RONYN TO
T
ANDY
C
RONYN

“The barbarian lies miserably close
under the skin of all of us.”

“The son of a bitch would fix the damn lights if they'd let him,” said Spencer Tracy when he was asked what it was like to work with Hume Cronyn. Small and wiry, Hume Cronyn was a professional obsessed with detail. In a career that spanned nearly sixty years, he wrote, directed, produced, and acted. His talent and drive earned him an Oscar nomination, a Tony, an Emmy, and the National Medal of Arts. He performed for television and the movies, but it was in the theater where he felt he most belonged, and never more so than when he was acting with his wife Jessica Tandy. As a professional team they were legendary, but offstage Cronyn “never felt [he] was much of a success as a parent.” He thought his standards may have been too exacting and that he had been overly rigid with his stepdaughter, son, and daughter. His letters, however, especially those to youngest daughter, Tandy, are exceptional—straightforward, challenging, respectful, and affectionate.