Belle Lettres

My favorite new blog is Today in Letters, the happy spawn of Brian Sholis, managing editor at Artforum.com. Each day, Brian posts a new letter or diary entry corresponding to the date of the posting. Yesterday’s letter, for instance, was written by William Faulkner on Jan. 18, 1956, to his literary agent, Harold Ober. It deals with a piece Faulkner had written about the Emmett Till case and was trying to get published:

“I am not trying to sell a point of view, scratch anybody’s back, NAACP or liberals or anybody else. I am simply trying to state, with compassion and grief, a condition, tragic, in the country where I was born and which I love, despite its faults.”

Here we are privileged to watch a Nobel laureate and one of America’s greatest writers negotiating to get an article in a mass-market magazine. In the end, Harper’s bought it – for $350. Long past his prime as a novelist, deep in his alcoholism, Faulkner manages to sound impassioned, principled and a little cantankerous. Such are the pleasures Brian brings us daily.

His selection is eclectic, almost always surprising, and not chosen according to some political or literary formula. His recent authors, in regressive order, include Alan Bennett, Robert Browning (writing to Thackery), Hermann Hesse (writing to Thomas Mann), Marcel Proust, and William Blake. Here’s an excerpt from the Blake, who sounds, as always, like a blissed-out hippie with brains:

“O foolish Philosophy! Gratitude is Heaven itself; there could be no heaven without Gratitude. I feel it & I know it.”

My only disappointment in Today in Letters is the near-absence of Brian’s own writing. He sticks strictly to the letter or diary excerpt, adding only discrete footnotes. I admire his modesty, but I know from the private e-mails we have exchanged that Brian, though young, is an impressive writer. His prose is elegant and lively, always a pleasure.