Letters

                                                               

 Alfshult                                                          

 19 November 1892

Anna, My Idolized!!

As a clean and true love can hardly be revealed in words, I will by these lines ensure you that in my heart you have lit a mighty flame from the first moment when I got the happy chance to see you. Should I hide this passion inside me? Oh, if you have any idea of the might of love you must surely feel the impossibility to get loose from an object that you worship and from whom you get your real life. The life in my heart and my only real joy are just for you. To love you is my dearest spirit wish and to be loved by you my highest desire. Only for you I will live for only you can give my life its true happiness.

Thank you for the enjoyable moments you have given me. I am sure you will look upon this letter as venturesome and presumptuous. I myself didn’t know I could arrive at this boldness. Only I can feel my experience and my spirit so how could I find words to describe the indelible impression you have made on me? For the first thing I know what ecstasy is and with it a flood of proposals for one thing and then another will constantly force their way to my mind--giving my life and my future prospects a new direction. But I hope you will recompense my love for you and not let a hopeless love be the consuming poison on my heart, the oppressed yoke on soul and body, the painful demon, which sucks out life.

I don’t dare hoping of your love because I know that you have friends who could be better than I am, but please then tell me. My dearest wish is that this letter will not be the last I’ll send to you. May the innocence of life prosper on your red cheek and may your life enjoy the good wishes from a boy who loves you, asking for your heart, too much to ask of course, my heart I’ll give to you if you want. Full of hope I look forward to that day when I will get a yes from you. Signed by your true-hearted adorer Aron Alfsen to Anna Beata!

The letter arrived at my Father’s cousin’s house in New Jersey from Sweden almost 100 years after it was dated and on Valentine’s Day. He translated it and sent it to all the scattered families. The story was that an old cabinet was being taken from a farmhouse and the letter slipped out. Moved, the people who read it took it upon themselves to find the relatives of Aron and Anna. 

 Aron was 19 when he wrote this, the first correspondence between them, and Anna was 18. They married on December 14^th, 1894.They lived happy, healthy, long lives and were the parents of my beloved Grandmother Ida. Uncle Fred remembers them well. When Anna died in 1950 he said Aron stood up and read a poem he wrote about her and their love story.

Aron deserted his 30-year Army enlistment and left for the United States in early April of 1898. He got caught in Liverpool for his desertion and was asked to pay $50 to clear up the matter. He bluffed and said he would actually prefer to go back to Sweden and promptly disembarked. He bought an accordion, his only baggage, and snuck back on the next ship out. The full trip to Pennsylvania took from April 10 to May 5, 1898. 

According to my Grandfather John, “When Aron Alfsen left Sweden, he left his wife and two children: Arthur, about 2 years old, and Judith, about 5 months old. Judith had been ailing since a month or two of age [she died about five days after Aron left]. She was buried at Alekulla Church cemetery. It was a long time before Anna heard from her husband. Finally she got a letter and on the way home from the post office, she sat down on a tombstone to read it. Having read it, she cried for joy.”  Anna arrived in Pennsylvania with their son at the end of the same year. They had another daughter in 1899 and also named her Judith. 

They lived in a sweet small house on Route 6 in Ludlow Pennsylvania. Tiny town—when I walked down the street on my summer visits I knew or was related to someone in every single house. 

Aron worked every day in the woods cutting timber and skidding logs until he was 75. He died in 1957 and is buried next to Anna and two of their children, Joseph and Ruth, in the Ludlow cemetery. 

 *Alfshult is the name for a plot of land and house near Oxaback, Vastergotland, Sweden. Alfsen received Alfshult when he joined the army the previous year.

*"Dyrkade Anna!!"  I used to carry a copy of the original language letter with me for about ten years. C's Swedish hockey teammate read the opening salutation, which had first been translated by my relative as “Adored Anna," and said that it is a much more intense word and usually used for a reverential religious love.  He said, “Wait, I have to get my mind around this” and looked down muttering a woman's name with Dyrkade attached. We were in a loud sports bar at the time.  He just shook his head finally giving a tiny smile and straightened up to keep reading.

                 Grandma Ida and Father Paul...in front of Great Uncle Arthur's house

---

Know Your Heroes: Philip Levine

LIBRARY DAYS

I would sit for hours with the sunlight

streaming in the high windows and know

the delivery van was safe, locked in the yard

with the brewery trucks, and my job secure.

I chose first a virgin copy of The Idiot

by Dostoevsky, every page of which confirmed

life was irrational. The librarian, a woman

gone gray though young, sat by the phone

that never rang, assembling the frown

reserved exclusively for me when I entered

at 10 A.M. to stay until the light dwindled

into afternoon. No doubt her job was to guard

these treasures, for Melville was here, Balzac,

Walt Whitman, my old hero, in multiple copies

each with the aura of used tea bags. In late August

of 1951 a suited gentleman reader creaked

across the polished oaken floor to request

the newest copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships

only to be told, “This, sir, is literature!”

in a voice of pure malice. I looked up

from the text swimming before me in hopes

of exchanging a first smile; she’d gone back

to her patient vigil over the dead black phone.

Outside I could almost hear the world, trucks

maneuvering the loading docks or clogging

the avenues and grassy boulevards of Detroit.

Other men, my former schoolmates, were off

on a distant continent in full retreat, their commands

and groans barely a whisper across the vastness

of an ocean and a mountain range. In the garden

I’d planted years before behind the old house

I’d long ago deserted, the long winter was over;

the roses exploded into smog, the African vine

stolen from the zoo strangled the tiny violets

I’d nursed each spring, the mock orange snowed

down and bore nothing, its heavy odor sham.

“Not for heaven or earth would I trade my soul,

rather would I lie down to sleep among the dead,”

Prince Myshkin mumbled on page 437,

a pure broth of madness, perhaps my part,

the sole oracular part in the final act

of the worst play ever written.  I knew then

that soon I would rise up and leave the book

to go back to the great black van waiting

patiently for its load of beer kegs, sea trunks

and leather suitcases bound for the voyages

I’d never take, but first there was War and Peace,

there were Cossacks riding their ponies

toward a horizon of pure blood, there was Anna,

her loves and her deaths, there was Turgenev

with his impossible, histrionic squabbles,

Chekhov coughing into his final tales. The trunks—

with their childish stickers—could wait, the beer

could sit for ages in the boiling van slowly

morphing into shampoo. In the offices and shops,

out on the streets, men and women could curse

the vicious air, they could buy and sell

each other, they could beg for a cup of soup,

a sandwich and tea, some few could face life

with or without beer, they could embrace or die,

it mattered not at all to me, I had work to do.

Know Your Heroes: Joseph Cornell

    "L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours elementaire d'histoire naturelle" 
                                                                     1940




 

“The idea of working in boxes had occurred to Cornell years earlier when he left his house one day on his daily foray to the supermarket and passed a theatre on the opposite side of the street. He happened to look at the box office, which was separate from the theatre in the old-fashioned way, and saw a new ticket taker--blonde, blue-eyed, very young, altogether a very pretty girl. He was awestruck by this vision of a girl in a box. After a week or two of walking past this girl, he finally screwed up his courage and bought a dozen roses from a florist. When he walked up to the girl he became tongue-tied and couldn’t get the words out, so he just opened the door and hurled the flowers at her. The girl screamed, and the theatre manager came running out. The police were called, and Cornell was taken off to the station house, where he spent the day.” [The Art Dealers, Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones 1979]

"If you love watching movies from the middle on, Cornell is your director. It's those first moments of some already-started, unknown movie with its totally mysterious images and snatches of dialogue before the setting and even the vaguest hint of a plot became apparent that he captures." [Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic 1991]

Wisconsin: ceramic things, beach towel older than i am, log respect, water fountains inside homes, nice old handmade maps

Los Angeles 12

                                                                         1.

It is "spider season," she said. 

                                                                         2.

Went to frenchlunch with a friend then to a movie. Afterwards a coldfancy but also goodweird shop where I found perfect vintage baggy green trousers from Japan that are now in the freezer. We met some Belgians with jetlag and went to their art show, had impromtu gelato and then to a friends book reading in Echo Park. I came home and started the recorded game five of the Stanley Cup finals and knew I was falling asleep, a nap forced itself on me, paused the game on the way down, then woke to a guy walking by outside speaking a long sentence in Spanish with the embedded words "Wayne Gretzky" so I woke up thinking the Kings won. They didn't. 

                                                                         3.

Los Angeles 11