Love Letters That Will Change How You Think About Historical Figures
The sexts of tomorrow’s historical figures can live on for only a brief window — after all, it’s pretty difficult to archive a DM. Fortunately, that’s not true for the last few hundred years, when telling your beloved that the cake is sweet meant putting it on paper. It’s a truth throughout history that everyone gets weird when they’re horny, including…
James Joyce
Joyce loved his wife, Nora, and he especially loved her farts. In a letter from 1909, he fondly recalled an intimate evening when she had “an arse full of farts… big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.” He ends by declaring that he “would know Nora’s fart anywhere,” which is honestly pretty sweet. How many of us can say the same about our spouses?
Charles Bukowski
Meanwhile, Bukowski’s favorite quality of Linda King’s wasn’t part of her body but apparently a home appliance. In a 1972 letter, he remembered, “you, up against the refrigerator,” before remarking, “you have such a wonderful refrigerator,” which is a pretty strange thing to notice, let alone comment on, in such a situation. He ends, “I love you… and your refrigerator.” It must have had four shelves.
Marlon Brando
By 1966, Brando was probably used to women not being all that particular about how he spoke to them, which is the only explanation for why on earth he would write the letter that he left for a flight attendant he’d barely met. “There is something not quite definable in your face — something lovely, not pretty in a conventionally thought of way,” is the not-great way he began before deducing that she had “been loved in her childhood, or else, somehow by the mystery of genetic phenomena you have been visited by the gifts of refinement, dignity and poise,” though he could be wrong and “perhaps you cannot be accredited with all that.” It’s a real master class in negging.
Virginia Woolf
Writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West had an affair over many years and many more letters, but one in particular puzzles even Woolf scholars. In response to a fairly normal 1926 letter from Sackville-West expressing how much she missed Woolf, she closed, “Open the top button of your jersey and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same.” Was she saying she liked Vita’s sweater squirrels? Likening herself to a squirrel nestling in her cleavage? It’s incredibly unclear. Hey, would Virginia Woolf’s fursona have been a wolf? Forget we asked that.
Ayn Rand
Speaking of furries, it’s hard to imagine any kind of sweet nothings coming from the pen of Ayn Rand, but nobody saw “Cubbyhole” coming. That was her pet name for her husband, to whom she wrote letters adorned with illustrations of sad cats, calling herself “Your Fluff.” “I’m a poor little feline with a can tied to my tail,” she pouted in a 1936 letter, complaining that even their two housecats (helpfully illustrated, alongside her rendering of herself as a crying cat) won’t talk to her. Keep in mind that Rand would hate us thinking about her as a lonely furry talking to her cats, so it’s very important that we do it as much as possible.