of the Player Piano: see headnote to 29 May 1950.
Blackmur: R. P. Blackmur (1904–65), American critic and poet.
It won’t be minutes: “For it won’t be minutes but hours / For it won’t be hours but years”—from the “Fragment of an Agon” portion of Sweeney Agonistes.
To Edith Gaddis
Puerto Limón, Costa Rica
[May 1948—same day as previous letter]
dear Mother.
[...] In about 8days another boat is due here, a boat to take a load of of wood for plywood to Charleston SC, I have met the plywood man here who is cheerfully drunk most of the time, consequently amiable and says I can probably get on his wood boat if I can’t get a banana boat, the sea outside is furious and the prospect of wandering 1500miles out on it is rather disconcerting.
The morning I blew 30¢ at a peluqueria, that is a barber shop, I think it was well-spent. I eat regularly though the fare here recalls a poem I never learned which starts —Nothing to do but work, nothing to eat but food; Nothing to wear but clothes to keep from going nude. [...]
You may gather this is not an intellectual centre, and so there is no problem about what book to read because there just aren’t any unless you have some you are carting around yourself, I am still carting around Mr Toynbee, and perhaps this happens for good reason because when I want to read I read Mr Toynbee again and it is a worthy task. Or if I do not read then I have bundles of papers which I have maligned all over with my own words, and they must be gone over and are being gone over; best though I have got to working again, I mean writing, it is not good yet but it is writing again and that is the only good feeling that makes any position tenable.
And that I recovered my raincoat, my friend-of-the-revolution Captain Madero recovered it in Cartago and since he is now running things at the airport at SanJose put the raincoat on a plane coming here and sure enough here it is, dirty and faithful.
Rumour has it that we are pretty deep in May, like I say the days run all together and you lose them to eachother, if I write again it will probably be a letter not much better than this one, I mean no newer than this one, or to tell you that I am sure that what I have are fleas, or that [if] they are not fleas they may be something a-kin (A little more of kin, and less than kind. —Hamlet. Heavens, I wish I had that here). If you write simply to Poste Restante, Limón C R it will reach me and probably be returned to you if I have gone if you put a return on it; or if pressing horror arrives cable via ALLAMERICA, the man who runs that office is a friend; otherwise I shall see you soon, here like Goethe’s Manto (Faust II ii) —I wait, time circles me.
Love,
W.
Nothing to do but work: the opening stanza of “The Pessimist‘ by American humorist Ben King (1857–94), included in some anthologies of nonsense verse.
Captain Madero: described as a “young captain” in WG’s “In the Zone” who later, “flying one of the army’s new planes, was killed when he hit a mountain” (RSP 37).
A little more of kin: “A little more than kin, and less than kind”; Hamlet 1.2.65.
Goethe’s Manto: daughter of the healing god Asclepius, Manto attempts to heal Faust’s frenzy by recommending stillness. WG quotes Anna Swanwick’s translation (1882), and used the quotation in R (61).
WG sailing for Spain, 6 December 1948.
To Edith Gaddis
[In “In the Zone,” WG indicates he “finally came home on a Honduran banana boat” (RSP 37), looking very sickly, according to his friend Vincent Livelli. During the summer of 1948 WG wrote an unpublished account of the Costa Rican war entitled “Cartago: Sobró con Quien,” and in September applied to Harvard for readmission. Unwilling to live in a dorm as required, he decided to go abroad again, this time to Spain. The letter below is written on stationery imprinted M/S Sobieski—the Polish passenger ship on which WG sailed—next to which he wrote “very much like Outward Bound,” a 1930 movie about an otherworldly ocean liner.]
Gibraltar
16 December 1948
dear Mother.
Well, here is the whole thing starting again—this time on a boat populated by Italians—often as though all of Mulberry street had set out for home, dolce Napoli. And it resolves itself into little beyond a very long 9 days of eating, & sleeping, staring at the Atlantic ocean, talking little; being somewhat melancholic—New York was such a magnificence when we finally sailed and left it there in the sun. Keep it for me.
And preparing for Spain. Spain. I must say, no one could come up to Baedeker for everything accounted for—I thank Mr. Hall again for it, as I am sure I shall do many times before I am done.
I don’t know whether, before leaving, I gave you any idea of my plans—except that they were few. But now plan to go from Gibraltar straight to Madrid (as “straight” as the broken-down Spanish railways will permit)—and look forward to that trip with excitement of course but also with some trepidation, what with 10 pounds of sugar on one shoulder, 10 of coffee on the other, cumbrous luggage in hand and the language mutilated in mouth. Eh bien—it shall be managed, and I shall write you again from Madrid, with an address of some permanence, since despite its climate being less agreeable than Sevilla, it will be a better place to start my acquaintance with Spain.
The leave-taking was good—it was kind of those various people to come and attend at the rail for so long. Sorry of course that you could not see it sail—but when you have this letter will know for certain that it did, and with much palpitation managed Gibraltar at least, and that I am in the country that lies “like a dead mackerel stinking and glittering in the moonlight”—and that, because of ill-management, you may not have my letters immediately.
And just now I call to mind that the whole “holiday season” is nigh, and that very possibly I shall not reach you again before it is passed. And so, all of the customary greetings to those customarily greeted—and best of course to you, trusting that things and people will arrange themselves for you happily—not including the ritual hour of orisons spent over the sink at 1837 East 15th street.
My sense of humour is somewhat in suspension—also other senses, and so my apologies for the dullness of this note. I find the Atlantic ocean very big, life very long, and thoughts far away and sentimental, as not to bear repeating. But Madrid and I will purge one another, and soon enough I shall be able to write to your pleasure and edification.
Meanwhile, best wishes, love, gratitude to you.
W.
Mulberry street: runs through Little Italy in lower Manhattan. dolce Napoli: “sweet Naples.”
