Posterity (18 page)

In 1961, sixteen-year-old Tandy was enamored with the experience of studying in Germany. In an enthusiastic and essentially thoughtful letter, she told her parents of her fascination with the German people and went on to say that “we have to forgive them sometime” for the Nazi atrocities of World War II. “If a race of people has to be blamed, why not admit that the humans in general are guilty,” she wrote. “Every nation has its black side.” Here, with clarity and humanity, Hume Cronyn responds to his adolescent daughter.

May 26
^th
, 1961

Tandy dear,

This letter is confidential, something between you and me alone, so I urge you not to leave it and certain of the enclosures lying around. It's merely a matter of discretion, certainly not of shame or apology. You are a guest in Germany and I think it's stupid to risk hurting feelings and, as you've wisely pointed out, it's hardly fair to blame your contemporaries for the injustices of another generation.

In all probability, few of your friends can read English and few of the faculty, too, perhaps, but it would not take a very astute individual whose eye might fall on the words, Auschwitz or Ravensbrueck, to conclude that your reading matter was rather particular in nature. I sound rather like I'm pussy-footing, don't I? The essence of what I'm getting at is this. I'm no less willing to introduce you to the influences of anti-Germanism than I am to those of anti-Semitism. Your personal and political feelings must be based on your own judgment and your own experience. You are liberal and tolerant by instinct and I hope by upbringing. These attitudes would seem to be reflected in the long letter you wrote to us from Italy. It was a copy of this letter that I sent to Eleanor Wolquitt. Do you remember her? A very pretty, very clever young woman, a great linguist who is a reader at 20
^th
Century-Fox. Eleanor is a great and respected friend of mine. She is also Jewish. As she says herself, her feelings in regard to anti-Semitism, the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Eichmann trial are visceral . . . if you don't know that word, it has to do with guts, your insides. It's an emotion so deep that it cannot honestly be considered objective, and yet Eleanor's “visceral” feelings are buttressed by great intelligence and sensitivity.

It seems to me that you are old enough and wise enough to be exposed to both sides of an appaling controversy, and that you may be safely exposed to the conflict and arguments no matter how ugly nor how frightening.

It's a great temptation to me to express my own viewpoint in regard to your Italian letter, the Eichmann trial and Eleanor's letters, but I'm going to resist this because I want you to come to your own conclusions and I would like to be able to discuss those with you when you're at home again. “Conclusions” is, perhaps, a bad word. While you may strive for absolute opinions with regard to moral issues, I doubt that you can come to absolute conclusions in regard to history and politics. And I doubt that it's possible to be absolute in an opinion of a nation. The barbarian lies miserably close under the skin of all of us. I
do
think that we are inclined to have national traits and characteristics, some of them pretty frightening, just as we have them in families. Our last best hope may be that, as the world grows smaller and we become one community of human beings, our good and our bad may counter-balance one another and that between all families, there may emerge a universal morality and a universal human characteristic superior to any of those in existence today.

Coming back to Eleanor's letters and the piece in the Saturday Review,
please bring these home with you.
I have no copies.

I was fascinated to hear that you'd written something on the Eichmann trial and I'm most curious about the point of view which you expressed. I would have thought it might have been a difficult subject to tackle in your present surroundings. However, I don't know them and you do.

I can't continue with this letter, my darling, as I promised to go and watch Mummie run through MACBETH. Dr. Gott promises you a very warm welcome at l'Arcadie. Chris seems to have his job on a boat for the latter part of the summer and both Mummie and I await your home-coming with great eagerness. I shall send Brenda a check for your traveling expenses. I'd already written to Mr. Hansen—before I knew you were going to spend a holiday with them—and I'm sure you will acknowledge their hospitality.

Much love, dear one.

P.S. If you feel you must discuss any of the enclosed material with someone at Stein, then of course you are free to do so, but be careful about it, darling, and I would avoid discussing it with your young German friends unless they are both wise and tolerant beyond their years. They may feel that you are somehow accusing them in that very fashion that you yourself seem to consider unfair.

J
OHN
S
TEINBECK TO
J
OHN
S
TEINBECK
IV

“I had deep down convictions that I was a coward.”

“He always wanted to be where the action was,” said John Steinbeck's wife Elaine. So eager was he to witness World War II firsthand, that the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Grapes of Wrath
became a war correspondent in England, Italy, and Northern Africa for the
New York Herald-Tribune.
The following letter was written decades later, just months after Steinbeck's twenty-year-old son had gone overseas to fight the war in Vietnam with the United States Army. Five months later, in December of the same year, the sixty-four-year-old John Steinbeck himself flew to Southeast Asia to cover the war for
Newsday.

Sag Harbor
July 16, 1966

Dear John:

I do know what you mean. I remember the same feeling when there were areas of trouble. “What the hell am I doing here? Nobody made me come.” On the other hand, when it was over, I was usually glad I had gone. And one other thing. Once it started the blind panic went away and another dimension took its place. Thinking about it afterward I became convinced that there is some kind of built in anaesthesia that balances and sets the terror back. Another thing that helps is the fact that you aren't alone. And everybody feels just as lousy when it is about to be. I don't know whether or not you took the Sneaky with you—that little leather flask. Fill it with whiskey—brandy is better. It can be a great comfort to you. There's no law against false courage. It's better than none at all.

Now let me discuss what you call your compulsion to be miserable. You think you had a choice—that you could just as well be in S.F. with all the amenities, comfort, ease and a certain immunity from gunfire. Well, the fact of the matter with you as well as with me is that there wasn't really any choice. You did and will do what you are. If you had forced yourself to make the opposite choice you would have been in violation of yourself, and I truly believe you would have been much more miserable than you are. Of course I am worried about you, just terribly worried, but I am proud too that you have not violated what you are.

Also check with yourself on this. I know it was true of me. I had deep down convictions that I was a coward. I think everyone has. If I had broken or gone to pieces, I wouldn't have been surprised. But when it came and I didn't go haywire, when I was scared but no more scared than those around me, the sense of relief was like a flood of compensation. Because I think a good part of this particular fear is a fear of how you will behave. And no one knows for sure, until he has gone through it.

I was horrified when you asked me to get you orders to go out, but I couldn't have failed you there. Do you know, that is the only request I have ever made of the President. The only one. And I was not happy about making it. But if I had had to request that you
not
be sent, I think I would have been far more unhappy.

Please keep in touch. I love you.

Fa

A
NNE
S
EXTON TO
L
INDA
S
EXTON

“Live to the HILT!”

That in the end Anne Sexton would take her own life was of little surprise to those close to her. Preoccupied with death, fascinated by suicide, for years she went about with a pocketbook equipped with pills, prepared at any time to end it all. A poet, a playwright, a wife and the mother of two daughters, Sexton was tall, beautiful, privileged, glamorous, promiscuous, quick-minded, and shaken to the core. Her daughter Linda said, “I ALWAYS lived on that brink of fear that she was going to fall apart and really kill herself.”

In her late twenties Anne Sexton was incapacitated and sent into a psychological tailspin by the trials of managing a household and caring for her two small daughters. Hospitalized and suicidal, she was set to the task of writing poetry by her psychiatrist. In a sense, she was broken by motherhood and saved by poetry. Her writing and her growing daughters held her from the world of the insane. In a poem for her younger daughter, Joy, Sexton concludes, “I made you to find me.”

In 1969 Anne Sexton was at her professional peak. For the first time a play she had written was to be staged Off-Broadway. She was a sought-after and well-paid performer, reading her poetry for audiences around the country. Her latest book,
Live or Die,
was about to win the Pulitzer Prize. It seemed, too, that her suicidal fantasies were being held at bay. Here, five years before her final day, Anne Sexton writes to her fifteen-year-old daughter, Linda.

[April 1969]
Wed—2:45 pm

Dear Linda,

I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was reading a
New Yorker
story that made me think of my mother and all alone in the seat I whispered to her “I know, Mother, I know.” (Found a pen!) And I thought of you—someday flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me.

And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won't be flying, maybe it will be at your
own
kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are 40.
Anytime
.)—I want to say back.

1st I love you.

2. You
never
let me down.

3. I know. I was there once. I
too
, was 40 with a dead mother who I needed still. . . .

This is my message to the 40 year old Linda. No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It is awfully lonely.
I
know that. Now you too know it—wherever you are, Linda, talking to me. But I've had a good life—I wrote unhappy—but I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda—Live to the HILT! To the top. I love you 40 year old, Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what you are!—Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart—I'm in both: if you need me. I lied, Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her—or she me! Silly Anne! So there!

XOXOXO
Mom

Yolanda Du Bois

Theodore Roosevelt

John O'Hara and daughter Wylie

Strength of
Character

J
ONATHAN
E
DWARDS TO
M
ARY
E
DWARDS

“But yet my greatest concern is for your soul's good.”

Jonathan Edwards, theologian, revivalist, and philosopher, was colonial America's most prominent religious thinker. He led eighteenth-century New Englanders into the “Great Awakening” by preaching a classic Puritanism that incorporated the new ideas of the Age of Reason.

During the summer of 1749, fifteen-year-old Mary Edwards was more than 150 miles from her Massachusetts home, visiting family friends in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while her father was embroiled in a furious battle with his congregation over the requirements for church membership. Edwards argued—contrary to the current acceptance of laxed standards—that membership should be granted only to those who provided evidence of an experience of “Saving Grace.” The following year his ardent position cost him his church.

Northampton, July 26, 1749

Dear Child,

You may well think that it is natural for a parent to be concerned for a child at so great a distance, so far out of view, and so far out of the reach of communication; where, if you should be taken with any dangerous sickness that should issue in death, you might probably be in your grave before we could hear of your danger.

But yet my greatest concern is for your soul's good. Though you are at so great a distance from us, yet God is everywhere. You are much out of the reach of our care, but you are every moment in his hands. We have not the comfort of seeing you, but he sees you. His eye is always upon you. And if you may but be sensibly nigh to him, and have his gracious presence, 'tis no matter though you are far distant from us. I had rather you should remain hundreds of miles distant from us and have God nigh to you by his Spirit, than to have you always with us, and live at a distance from God. And if the next news we should hear of you should be of your death (though that would be very melancholy), yet if withal we should hear of that which should give great grounds to hope that you had died in the Lord, how much more comfortable would this be (though we should have no opportunity to see you, or take our leave of you in your sickness), than if we should be with you all in your sickness, and have much opportunity to tend to you, and converse and pray with you, and take an affectionate leave of you, and after all have reason to apprehend that you died without God's grace and favor! 'Tis comfortable to have the presence of earthly friends, especially in sickness and on a deathbed; but the great thing is to have God our friend, and to be united to Christ, who can never die anymore, and whom even death can't separate us from.

My desire and daily prayer is that you may, if it may consist with the holy will of God, meet with God where you be, and have much of his divine influences on your heart wherever you may be, and that in God's due time you may be returned to us again in all respects under the smiles of heaven, and especially in prosperous circumstances in your soul; and that you may find all us alive. But that is uncertain; for you know what a dying time it has been with us in this town, about this time of year, in years past. There is not much sickness prevailing among us as yet, but we fear whether mortal sickness is not beginning among us. Yesterday Eliphaz Clap's remaining only son died of the fever and bloody flux, and is to be buried today. May God fit us all for his will.

I hope you will maintain a strict and constant watch over yourself and against all temptations: that you don't forget and forsake God; and particularly that you don't grow slack in secret religion. Retire often from this vain world, and all its bubbles, empty shadows, and vain amusements, and converse with God alone; and seek that divine grace and comfort, the least drop of which is more worth than all the riches, gaiety, pleasures and entertainments of the whole world.

If Madam Stoddard of Boston, or any of that family, should send to you to invite you to come and remain there on your return from Portsmouth, till there is opportunity for you to come home, I would have you accept the invitation. I think it probable that they will invite you. But if otherwise, I would have you go to Mr. Bromfield's. He and Madam both told me you should be welcome. After you are come to Boston, I would have you send us word of it. Try the first opportunity, that we may send for you without delay.

We are all through divine goodness in a tolerable state of health. The ferment in town runs very high concerning my opinion about the sacrament: but I am no better able to foretell the issue than when I last saw you. But the whole family has indeed much to put us in mind and make us sensible of our dependence on God's care and kindness, and of the vanity of all human dependences. And we are very loudly called to seek his face, trust in him, and walk closely with him. Commending you to the care and special favor of an heavenly Father, I am

Your very affectionate father,
Jonathan Edwards.

Your mother and all the family give their love to you.

A
BIGAIL
A
DAMS TO
J
OHN
Q
UINCY
A
DAMS

“It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of
a pacific station, that great characters are formed.”

With his education in mind, Abigail Adams strongly encouraged her son, John Quincy Adams, to cross the wintery Atlantic for the second time with his father. The year was 1779, America was furiously engaged in the War of Independence, and John Adams once again responded to the call of his countrymen to serve as Minister to France. With him aboard the French warship
Sensible,
John Adams took his boys, twelve-year-old John Quincy and nine-year-old Charles. Had the
Sensible
been captured by a British ship on the crossing, all 350 people on board would have been taken as prisoners of war.

They were spared a British assault, but the trip was harrowing still. Just two days off the coast of Massachusetts, the
Sensible
sprang a leak that continually grew worse and for the rest of the voyage the ship required constant pumping. Then, encountering a fierce storm, they were sent barely afloat into the nearest port at El Ferrol, Spain. One thousand miles from Paris, John Adams decided to make the rest of the journey with his boys by land, crossing the Pyrenees on mules in the middle of winter.

Nearly two months after John Quincy, Charles, and John Adams departed from America, Abigail Adams, at home in charge of the family farm in the midst of war, wrote the following letter to her eldest son. What the travelers had encountered on the high seas, whether they had arrived safely in Europe or that they were now crossing the Pyrenees, she had no way of knowing.

It would be well over four years before Abigail Adams saw her son John Quincy again.

Janry. 19 1780

My dear Son

I hope you have had no occasion either from Enemies or the Dangers of the Sea to repent your second voyage to France. If I had thought your reluctance arose from proper deliberation, or that you was capable of judgeing what was most for your own benifit, I should not have urged you to have accompanied your Father and Brother when you appeared so averse to the voyage.

You however readily submitted to my advice, and I hope will never have occasion yourself, nor give me reason to Lament it. Your knowledge of the Language must give you greater advantages now, than you could possibly have reaped whilst Ignorant of it, and as you increase in years you will find your understanding opening and daily improveing.

Some Author that I have met with compares a judicious traveler, to a river that increases its stream the farther it flows from its source, or to certain springs which running through rich veins of minerals improve their qualities as they pass along. It will be expected of you my son that as you are favourd with superiour advantages under the instructive Eye of a tender parent, that your improvements should bear some proportion to your advantages. Nothing is wanting with you, but attention, diligence and steady application. Nature has not been deficient.

These are times in which a Genious would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orater, if he had not been roused, kindled and enflamed by the Tyranny of Catiline, Millo, Verres and Mark Anthony. The Habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All History will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruits of experience, not the Lessons of retirement and leisure.

Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the Heart, then those qualities which would otherways lay dormant, wake into Life, and form the Character of the Hero and the Statesman.

War, Tyrrany and Desolation are the Scourges of the Almighty, and ought no doubt be deprecated. Yet it is your Lot my Son to be an Eye witness of these Calimities in your own Native land, and at the same time to owe your existance among a people who have made a glorious defence of their invaded Liberties, and who, aided by a generous and powerfull Ally, with the blessing of heaven will transmit this inheritance to ages yet unborn.

Nor ought it to be one of the least of your excitements toward exerting every power and faculty of your mind, that you have a parent who has taken so large and active a share in this contest, and discharged the trust reposed in him with so much satisfaction as to be honourd with the important Embassy, which at present calls him abroad.

I cannot fulfill the whole of my duty toward you, if I close this Letter, without reminding you of a failing which calls for a strict attention and watchful care to correct. You must do it for yourself. You must curb that impetuosity of temper, for which I have frequently chid you, but which properly directed may be productive of great good. I know you capable of these exertions, with pleasure I observed my advice was not lost upon you. If you indulge yourself in the practise of any foible or vice in youth, it will gain strength with your years and become your conquerer.