LETTER: ALS to Harold Brodkey.
An Apology from Cynthia Ozick to Harold Brodkey
Ozick, Cynthia. Autograph letter signed, “Cynthia,” to Harold Brodkey, Feb. 1, 1984.
Two 8vo. leaves, rectos only; creased from folding; written in black ink with the date written in pencil; fine.
An apologetic letter from Ozick, replying to a letter Brodkey wrote after disastrous dinner party at which the two had a disagreement. The letter reads in full:
Dear Harold,
We’re off to Jerusalem in a few days. I cannot leave without responding to your generous—spiritually generous—letter. You may have been wondering about my silence. Oh, a noisy & pondering silence! I have been waiting for the “perfect” tone, tell you how your surprising—unexpected—amazing!—letter touched me. I see now that the exactly right words will never come. Maybe only the worn old words will do: Harold, you touched my heart. We need not agree, but we mustn’t be enemies. I may not deserve you for a friend, but I know I don’t deserve you as an enemy. I think I know now, having replayed it often enough, what went wrong at that dinner: something antic in me that asked for indulgence in you, which you couldn’t give (possibly not [illegible] the antic ingredient, or else taking antic for its twin, frantic!); & also something deeply sober in you that asked for serious attentiveness in me, which in my antic state, I was negligently withholding. –If I could undo that terrible night, I would undo it! I was playing at mental extravagance. I was, I now see, showing off. You were serious; I wasn’t answering your seriousness in kind—& what’s more infuriating than that? Or what’s more infuriating than a show-off?
—You spoke, in capital letters, of jealousy. Oh, never. This I have thought about with true and years-long seriousness. Sentences, whoever writes them, whether one’s own pen or another’s, are, when struck off well, events for celebrations. So I celebrate yours, in all their beauty & strength & idiosyncratic cadence. And sentences are strengthened when there is a whole generation of writers striking them off well, attached to the hope of making them comely & power-charged. So writers of the same generation need one another to stand as ideals (or, as people say nowadays, “models”). Your beautiful and extremely generous letter is such an ideal for me.
Thank you, Harold.
And blessings on your work.
Best regards to Ellen.
Cynthia
(#10175)
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