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Reality is a complex affair, involving many different elements interacting across multiple scales in time and space.
It is a constantly
revolving, evolving jewel whose dim facets tease us with flashes of clarity.
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On this day in 1845 Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett,
so inciting one of the most legendary of literary love stories.
The letter belongs to the 'fan mail' category — the praise of a thirty-two-year-old up-and-comer for one just six years older and already internationally famous —
but it was more than just poet-to-poet:
"...I do,
as I say, love these books with all my heart — and I love you too."
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Dashiell Hammett died on this day in 1961, aged fifty-seven.
Though never a Barrett-Browning sort of love, Hammett’s thirty-year relationship with Lillian Hellman became especially strained in his last years,
as his health, finances and patience failed.
Exasperated by Hammett’s taciturn, unromantic ways, and knowing that time was running out, Hellman marked their last shared Thanksgiving, also the thirtieth anniversary of their first meeting,
by typing up a mock love letter in Hammett’s name and leaving it for him to sign:
On this thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of everything, I wish to state:
The love that started on that day was greater than all love anywhere, anytime, and all poetry cannot include it.
I did not then know what treasure I had, could not, and thus occasionally violated the grandeur of this bond.
For which I regret.
But I give deep thanks for the glorious day, and thus the name “Thanks-giving.” What but an unknown force could have given me, a sinner, this woman? Praise God.
Hammett enjoyed the joke —
one which played to his refusal to make any kind of testimony, whether in love or politics.
He signed his name, adding his own postscript in an uncertain hand:
“If this seems
incomplete it is probably because I couldn't think of anything else at the
time.”
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