I hope anyone reading this, or any of the other posts here, knows how dearly and sincerely I long for your approval as a reader; I want you to like my writing, and — just as importantly — I’ll never rarely ask for evidence of any of that. (I’ll just want you to keep coming back.)
That said, whoa, for a writer to get touched by a god, as it were — touched unbidden…
On this day in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned a little note to Walt Whitman. Emerson had apparently just finished reading the first printing of Leaves of Grass; he was so overcome by the experience that he had to sit down and just lay it out there for the poet. Here’s the full text of the letter (RWE being notably more pithy than, say, the average blogger):
21 July Concord Masstts. 1855
Dear Sir,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying & encouraging.
I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R. W. Emerson
Mr. Walter Whitman.
(Love that my benefactor, eh? Emerson saying he’s not Whitman’s benefactor, but vice-versa!)
Whitman — not really a fool, but maybe just a tad bit, um, well, brash — immediately put this private letter to good public use, even going so far as to quote from it on the spine of a later edition (without asking Emerson first). I can’t imagine, even remotely, having the temerity to do something like that. Even assuming I could sufficiently gather my wits anytime in the succeeding months to try, y’know? I’d just be so flattened, immobilized, by a letter at all like this.
Which made me wonder: what author living today would have this effect on me? What author looms so large either in my own head, or in the culture at large, that I’d just about fall over, stunned, if I got a letter like this from him or her?
I don’t know. Toni Morrison, maybe? Stephen King? John Irving? J.K. Rowling? Michael Chabon or Jeffrey Eugenides? Thomas Pynchon? Ghostly writing, in mid-air or on lavatory wall, signed by E.B. White, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut?
I’m not talking career here — not “Of whom could I make the best use?” but rather, “Whose unsolicited, whole-hearted and unambivalent approval would send me into swooning ecstasy?”
Who’d do it for you?
Jules says
“I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion.” Now, *that’s* some serious adoration. Wow.
That is an excellent question but so hard to answer. I’d say: Contemporay — Haven Kimmel. Maurice Sendak, even though most of his books haven’t been beyond 32 pages. I’ll also say Alice McDermott, whose writing I adore and whose first novel ever I’m currently reading. Regina McBride. Jon McGregory. Ann Patchett.
Ghostly? Rilke (if I wrote poetry — hey, I don’t write novels or short stories or any kind of fiction either, but it’s still a fun question). Graham Greene. Oh, I could go on.
Jules says
Ergh. I meant: Jon McGregor
cynth says
Oh, John, this is too good to pass up! Stephen King, John Irving, Diana Gabaldon! What would it be like to get accolades from C.S. Lewis? Or even Lewis Carroll? Or a note on whisper thin parchment from T.H. White…you’re right, Jules…I could go on!
John says
Jules: Thank you for conceding, finally (however implicitly), that one needn’t write fiction or poetry to be a writer. Ahem.
Excellent choices (the ones I’m familiar with, which is okay; this is a choose-your-own-neighborhood sort of question). Rilke: Oooooooh! I was a little surprised not to see Ms. Phillips in your list. :)
cynth: *fanning self* Also excellent choices!
I have a feeling that an unsolicited letter of praise from Lewis Carroll might take the form of a puzzle inside of an acronym wrapped in an anagram, or something like that. A portmanteau blurb: if you tried to use it on a book cover, it would somehow fold up inside itself and land you, head spinning, in one of the blurber’s own works.
But now you’ve got me thinking about a blurb from Ogden Nash…
Querulous Squirrel says
For me, the sort of dead writers: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kafka, Poe, Dostoevsky, Gogol. Among the living, I don’t know. I think I’m a ghost from another time and place. If Michael Chabon praised me, I’d go “eh, he’s derivative of all the other guys I like too.”
Froog says
Well, I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, but I think I’d suffer a bit of a fan-boy heartflop if Paul Auster dropped me a note.
And if we’re allowed blurbs from beyond the grave, I think I’d have to go with Tolstoy.
Or Dickens.
Or Jane Austen. She’d probably be very funny and just a little flirtatious, and I wouldn’t be confident that she wasn’t just teasing me.
Manhasset blurring, says ReCaptcha. I think I have a title for my novel!
John says
Squirrel: Yikes. If I saw those blurbs on your book jacket I’d probably be intimidated as hell even to open to the first page. (Well, not really, I mean I have a sorta fair idea what your first page will look like. But intimidated… intimidated in the abstract.)
I love Michael Chabon (although I haven’t read everything he’s written), maybe because I’m not very well-read in many areas (e.g., fiction from Continental Europe/Russia) and so miss the original source material. To me, when he’s being what I think of as “derivative” he seems to be doing so consciously — more like playing with themes and conventions, as opposed to ripping off.
Froog: That’s a nice depiction of Jane Austen, and if you could sustain it over a book’s length you might find many more readers than even the current zombified adaptation of P&P.
Of course if she actually did try it, and did turn out like that, you’d have to do a Fantasy Girlfriend post about the experience. Which would certainly give later candidates an uphill climb.
(Hmm. Auster… Austen…)
I’m afraid my own reCaptcha will never make it to a book’s spine: Mississippi uvulars.
Froog says
I have another character name here on ReCaptcha now – Dave Westminster.
Perhaps we (by which I mean you) should write a short story inspired exlusively by randomly generated character names.
Miriam says
Tamora Pierce! And… um… Mercedes Lackey! Lois Lowery, Terry Brooks, Robin McKinley, Holly Black, Libba Bray…
I’d pretty much fall over dead if I got a letter like that from any of them.
marta says
I’d freak out if just about anyone wrote me a letter like that. But that’s me.
Here’s a story though. A while back I blogged about that The Truth about Unicorns book. The author, Bonnie Jones Reynolds, must’ve googled herself or something because one fine day I opened my email and had a comment from her.
Now she hadn’t read my novel or said anything about my writing ability, but she said how nice it was to know her novel had moved me and so on. Understand that when I was a teenager, this was my favorite novel ever. I kept it checked out from the library for weeks. Read it two times in one weekend. It took me six years of searching used bookstores to get my own copy and I jumped up and down in the aisle when I found. Literally. I screamed, jumped, and ran to the counter.
So to get this note from her–even now–made me scream, jump, and run to tell my husband. What a feeling!
John says
Froog: I’m always fascinated not just by the reCaptcha word pairs themselves, but by the way our minds work to connect them somehow — imposing a story or a character on arbitrary text strings.
(For a reCaptcha story idea of my own, see a post from last year. I never wrote that story, either. :)
Miriam: Isn’t it funny how even level-headed writers get all attack-of-the-vapors at the thought ? I wonder if any of your picks ever got feedback like this?
(P.S. I love Libba Bray. You’ve visited her blog, right?)
marta: Great story — I think I’d have about fallen out of my chair, as they say. Please tell me you wrote back to her!
The way big-name writers now need publicity people as well as agents and editors, I know I’m much more likely to hear from (say) Don DeLillo’s “people” than from DeLillo himself. (Quite possibly enjoining me to never again mention him in a RAMH context.) Which makes me almost want to never again mention a living famous person here — the disappointment of second-hand contact would feel too much like getting a very polite “Loved it, but no thanks” rejection letter.