Epistolary

October 16, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Epistolary

By Leo Racicot

I suppose my lifelong love of letters and letter-writing began when I discovered The Letters of Emily Dickinson. I was young, maybe 15 or 16. I also at the same time came across the Letters of Vincent van Gogh. The discovery was revelatory; the idea that the personal correspondence of the lofty artists I admired — what they thought, where they went, who they knew — had been preserved, was exciting, brought them face-to-face as living, breathing human beings, made them accessible to the degree they became like old friends. After all, weren’t they much like the rest of us? They had their dreams, their fears, their hopes, revealing who they were as people. I still pull Emily Dickinson’s letters down from the shelf every Fall, feeling that Autumn, a season she wrote much about, is the perfect season to re-read her.

When my friend, Joe went away to college, to UMass Amherst, I stayed in Lowell to attend Lowell State Teachers College. It was the first time in four years we were separated. We began a years-long correspondence, a way for us to keep in touch while apart. When he transferred to UMass/Boston and made his dream of living on Beacon Hill come true, the letters continued. Even though we were only a train ride away and did see each other periodically, the allure of the written letter remained. We exchanged hundreds of letters over the years, many of them gems of penpalship. When life took us to different places; he, to Chicago to accompany his brother, John, who was matriculating at Northwestern, me, to Las Vegas, Cambridge, Cape Cod, the habit of staying in touch by pen and paper happily continued. We both saved every letter, often decorating the backs of the envelopes with decals, photo cutouts, sometimes elaborate displays of our shared interests. What the mailman must have thought! Who cares? We were forging a bond; snail mail creates a patience, a pause for reflection that a phone call is incapable of, especially in today’s culture where the quick click of an emoji is used to express it all. This is why I’ve loved and continue to love letters, even when the friend I’m writing to lives not very far away.

Some of my pen pals did live a distance away; when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I sponsored a young lady, Hsaih Mi-Chu, in China. What a thrill it was for years sending and receiving airmail, seeing the exotic postage, looking at the hieroglyphics of Hsaih’s Chinese script (along with her handwritten letters, a page translating her words, her life stories, her adventures, would be included) She and her letters brought the world closer…

Hsaih Mi-Chu’s letters are stored in my attic as are dozens and dozens of letters from friends (my high school & college pal, Linda Scanlon, college intimate, Roberta McAnespie, Joe’s, of course, who’d often include with his missive delightful newspaper and magazine clippings he thought I’d enjoy). I’ve also kept the dozens of epistles written by editor Winston Leyland who took editorship beyond the usual boundaries into friendship.

And of course, I can’t omit my letters from writer M.F.K. Fisher. Before our friendship blossomed into an enduring love and visits out to her home, Last House, in Glen Ellen, California, we sent letters back-and-forth. Her letters bristled with personal stories, gossipy anecdotes, recipes, scintillating tales out-of-school. My letters to her tried hard to impress. When we first began corresponding, Mary Frances said she thought my writing style made her think I was a wise, old professor in a small, college town, “so polished is your prose”. (later on, she even crafted a short story about an old professor’s last days, The Reunion, in her collection, Sister Age). Wasn’t she shocked when a young fellow in his early thirties showed up at her door! And, wasn’t I shocked, when, following her death, the literary executors of her estate, notified me that our correspondence would be housed along with others in her collection of papers at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe! Through the years, whenever I need a lift, I visit Schlesinger, spend an afternoon poring through the words of my beautiful friend, my words to her….The M.F.K. connection lives on, in part, with a 30 year continuation of wonderful letters from Mary Frances’ former staff members, good friends, Pat and Marsha Moran. Pat is a fantastic writer in his own right, Marsha, his live-in editor, who also happens to be his wife. In a way, my heart still lingers in bonny Glen Ellen thanks to the epistolary magic they’ve conjured regularly throughout the years; I just had a long, good letter from Pat yesterday.

Looking back, I see I was blessed to become pen pals with several well-known people (If I like and admire someone’s work, I am compelled to write to let them know).

The gay writer, Edmund White, by the time I wrote him, wasn’t much for letter-writing; the culture had made it easier to communicate by email and social media, especially for one as busy as he was. But I have literally thousands of emails from Ed filled with his brilliance, his quick wit, his naughty asides. I treasure them.

Also, in the famous category is travel writer, Jan Morris whom I met during her lecture/book signing at Cambridge Public Library in 1988 when she made the startling comment, “What a joy it was staring out at the audience, seeing your lovely, androgynous face!” Good grief! We, too, became years-long pen pals, she, often telling me I “must come to my home and share tea and scones with my wife, Elizabeth and me” It seemed wildly improbable that I could ever make a trip to the enchanted woodlands of Wales where they made their home but it was so nice to be invited, whether ingenuous or not.

It was said that the actress, Katharine Hepburn, didn’t like to sign autographs, answer letters from fans. But I have many from her in reply to my sending her a screenplay I’d written specifically with her in mind, Walking Song. She initially warmed to the script and the part I’d designed for her. She did express concerns that some of the character’s monologues were too long, that at her age she would have difficulties memorizing them. She asked me to trim them down. Long story short — many edited versions of the manuscript travelled back-and-forth to her Turtle Bay home at 244 East 49th Street. She’d always send them back saying, “Still too long!” Ever hopeful, I kept cutting and cutting and cutting until the day came when she said, “It’s too short. You’ve whittled this thing down to a nub!” By the time an in-person visit came to pass, I’m afraid the great actress had “gone away with the fairies”, as the Irish say, and that, as they was that re Walking Song which is gathering dust in the attic.

The English wit and eccentric, Quentin Crisp and I exchanged notes and letters in the 1990s. In one of his to me, he said something that has stayed with me all these years. In response to my moaning that my love life was a disaster, Crisp wrote, “My dear boy. There is no more to be said for loving one person than for loving the whole world.”

I found the life and work of the Canadian gay liberation figure, Jearld Moldenhauer fascinating, wrote to tell him so. His place in that movement has, I feel, gone unsung. Activist, journalist, horticulturist extraordinaire, founder of one of the first, if not the first, gay bookstore, The Glad Day bookshops, one in Toronto, one, here in Boston. The list of his credits and talents is endless. My letter found him living in Fez, Morocco, in an architectural wonder, Dar Balmira, an ancient guesthouse with a legendary rooftop garden and art gallery. I thrilled to his descriptions of life among the natives there, so different was it from anything I knew. Jearld, a restless nomad, moved to Manila in the Philippines and we fell out-of-touch.

My whole life, I’ve been lucky to find pen pals who like snail mail as much as I do. For over twenty years now, my good friend, Bob Stone (who managed the Shea household for twenty-six years) and I have been exchanging weekly letters, I throw a movie quiz in with each letter because I know how much he likes the movies of The Golden Age of Hollywood, has the answers to practically every question I throw at him. I love seeing his letters in the front hall.

Lowell historian, Richard Howe, too, is so kind to reply to my maybe too-frequent letters. A polymath, Dick’s interests and work are endlessly fascinating to me and bring a contented pleasure to the winter of my days…

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