Thursday, July 2, 2009

Thomas Wolfe on Aline Bernstein and Aline Bernstein on Thomas Wolfe

William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe's writings for years. He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard--a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. The sweetests and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, "My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits."

. . .

After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased [Bernstein's letters from Wolfe]. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to [Maxwell Perkins] about this stipulation, she said: "It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me."

Max Perkins, Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, Pocket Books, 1978, p.524-525

This Explains Everything

Anne-Louise-Germaine de Stael-Holstein (nee Necker)
Madame de Stael
Delphine (1802)
5-page tale "The Reasons Why Leontine de Ternan Decided to Become a Nun.

"I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. The two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22689?email