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Having spent the past week devouring What There is to Say We Have Said, the new collection of the correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, and thereby being reminded of just how much I love to read writers’ letters, I pawed through my books Sunday afternoon to see just how many collections I have. The results:
The Selected Letters of Lord ByronWhich leads me to the question: what am I missing? Knowing my taste, as so many of you do, are there collections I should seek out while I wait for a volume by Anthony Powell and further volumes from Iris Murdoch?
The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov
The Letters of Lord Chesterfield
The Letters of Noel Coward
The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert
The Lyttleton-Hart-Davis Letters, Volume I
Selected Letters of Julian Maclaren-Ross
The Letters of Herman Melville
In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire (Mitford) and Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Letters of Jessica Mitford
The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-73
The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh
Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-1945 (more, please!)
A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography [of Barbara Pym] in Diaries and Letters
Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991
Tolstoy's Letters, Volumes I and II
The Letters of E. B. White
If you're up for more Maxwell, his correspondence with Sylvia Townshend Warner, The Element of Lavishness, is both different (Warner being a bit more eccentric than Welty) and similar (Maxwell being so very civilized, always).
ReplyDeleteNot sure if this is your thing, but I dearly love Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. She was the children's books editor at Harper's for years and worked with Maurice Sendak, E.B. White, Louise Fitzhugh, and many more. It's just lovely.
I always get a giggle out of Joyce's letters to Nora Barnacle. Also I see there is a volume of his "Selected Letters" published.
ReplyDeleteThe first volume (of a proposed four or five?) of Sam Beckett's letters is utterly delightful. It's mainly split between pragmatic sorts of letters that are revealing in a biographical/historical way, and more personal letters to writer-friend Thomas McGreevy. Beckett is, in the latter especially, exceedingly funny and erudite and loving, and fantastically devoted / methodical about what he sees as his path towards writing.
ReplyDeleteAnd - (spoken naively, having not read too much in the way of correspondence before) - the editing and footnoting of the letters seems quite comprehensive and fantastic.
Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps, edited by John McIntyre, is an enthralling telling of this literary friendship. This seems like your kind of book. Also, Words In Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, published a few years by FSG, is not to be missed. FSG has also just published Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker, which is an epistolary history of that relationship.
ReplyDeleteThe Selected Correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson is a treat.
ReplyDelete"The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor." They're extraordinary. And I don't even like reading other people's mail.
ReplyDeleteBernard Shaw's collected letters (in four volumes) sustained me for several years. I even folded down page corners and inserted bookmarks for the more pungent passages.
ReplyDeleteI learned from him how to respond to critical slams, both professional and personal and how to lighten your prose while still making your points.
His correspondence takes up four volumes, and editor Dan Laurence did a fine job of annotating them with a graph at the head of each letter setting the context.
If that isn't enough, there are also books on his correspondence with Alfred Douglas and Ellen Terry.
Wait...where is your copy of Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya (aka the Nabokov-Wilson letters)??
ReplyDeleteI second Lisa's recommendation of the Ursula Nordstrom book. It's terrific. I would add to it Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being (the best collection of letters out there, in my opinion), the selected Letters of Raymond Chandler edited by Frank MacShane (just great), and the letters of John Cheever, William James, and Van Gogh (though I've only seen samples of the Van Gogh -- a lavishly illustrated multi-book set was published in the UK not long ago, and it's high on my list of unlikely-but-sought-after purchases).
ReplyDeleteI've also heard great things about the correspondence between Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, and even own a copy, but haven't dug in yet.
I second Lisa's recommendation of the Ursula Nordstrom book. It's terrific. I would add to it Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being (the best collection of letters out there, in my opinion), the selected Letters of Raymond Chandler edited by Frank MacShane (just great), and the letters of John Cheever, William James, and Van Gogh (though I've only seen samples of the Van Gogh -- a lavishly illustrated multi-book set was published in the UK not long ago, and it's high on my list of unlikely-but-sought-after purchases).
ReplyDeleteI've also heard great things about the correspondence between Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, and even own a copy, but haven't dug in yet.
You folks are great--thank you! Now to build a new stack of to-be-read volumes of letters.
ReplyDelete(Oh, and I left two off my list: Fanny Burney and Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Both very good!)