Letters: Charles Edward Wyzanski (Courtship, March 3 - June 1, 1943)

Written By Peter Sauter

  • My dear Miss Warburg,

    I deliberately waited to write saying how much I enjoyed being with you last Tuesday until I knew when I should next be in New York. Perhaps it is not quite fair to say in one breath “thank you” and “will you please.” But I so much want a favorable answer that I have combined my request with my note of appreciation.

    Will you be in town on Monday of next week, that is March 8th, and are you free that evening for dinner and for the theatre we did not get to last time. I suggest, unless you have seen them, either Helen Hayes in Harriet, or, if tickets are not available, Katharine Cornell in The Three Sisters or The Eve of St. Mark. I should suppose, if you are free, I might come to take you at 7p.m. in a dinner jacket. If Monday is a poor night, how about the following Saturday, March 10?

    Perhaps this letter will find you away on a speaking tour – (South Carolina may still have you in its grip) – and if I haven’t heard by Saturday, I shall assume that I am running a bad second to the tour. – [But, having vainly tried to reach you just now (5:30 p.m.) at Plaza 8-2548, I have hopes that you are on your way back from the South].

    Will you give my greetings to your parents whom I so enjoyed meeting last week.

    Faithfully, Charles Wyzanski

  • Dear Judge,

    Many thanks for your nice letter, which only reached me to-night – having been forwarded to me to this address where I am staying with a cousin of mine as my parents have gone to Palm Beach.

    Monday night would be fine – Saturday no good, but I wonder whether these lines will reach you in time as you have set Saturday as the dead line. Unless I hear to the contrary from you I shall presume that Monday 7 p.m. is O.K. Of the shows you suggest I should love to see “The Eve of St. Mark.” – “The Three Sisters” is no good, I saw it and I am not very crazy about Helen Hayes. I hope my choice will meet your approval.

    My telephone number here is Regent 73380 at the office Columbus 56585, should you want to reach me. Shall we really dress up, somehow I don’t feel like it these days. So, unless you order long dress, I shall be “informal.”

    Looking forward to Monday

    Very sincerely yours

    Gisela Warburg

  • Dear Gisela,

    You see I don’t intend to repeat my performance of calling you “My dear Miss Warburg.” I don’t feel the least bit solemn, and why pretend to be. It’s sometimes hard, as you said the other night, to make new friends after a certain age because one is more conscious of the effort it takes. But I refuse to look at you as a task to overcome. – That would be as silly as Voltaire’s remark that poetry has the merit of difficulty to overcome.

    Well I suppose I should say that I am sorry to have kept you out until 3 in the morning, for it undoubtedly spoiled your Sunday morning. But I am not in the least contrite. In New York City the wee hours at a bar are a substitute, and a very poor one, for a walk on a country road or a paddle on a lake. They give some chance to talk about all the irrelevancies of the world. And it is through them, by some paradox, that two people learn the relevant things about one another.

    I pursued one of the “irrelevancies” far enough to take from a bookstore The Valley of Decision. 700 pages for a novel is far beyond my usual capacity. I don’t mind wasting my time seeing a motion picture; but my initial reaction is that I’ll save my eyes to read non-fiction. However, I’m bound I’ll find what interested you; and I have 250 pages on the way.

    If one reads a Greek or Elizabethan play one never is jarred by the technical errors. The whole is fanciful; that is to say a departure from our normal experience, except the human characterization. So one tests the truth of the play only by how much verisimilitude the persons of the drama possess. – I suppose the same is true of Russian novels. But a contemporary American piece about mimes, mills and workers comes so close to the day’s routine that it has a harder criticism to face. I can’t say that Miss or Mrs. Davenport always rings the bell on that score. She makes errors in her business and labor terminology, and I don’t believe she has ever been through a first rate strike.

    But what interests me more is whether you believe she understands her human beings. I have never known the prototype of Mary. Of course, I appreciate some of the forces that made Mary and Paul fall in love. There is often at the root of sexual attraction something exotic, unconventional, even perverse. It is often easier to fall in love with a stranger (whether to your town or your class) than with one whose background is identical. – But I deny the likelihood of any girl whose development was entirely shaped by domestic housework becoming the dominant force in a steelmaster’s family that retained the vigor of the Scott’s, even in the 3rd generation.

    But more of this when I see you. And when will that be? You, as I recall, are to be in Richmond the afternoon of Thursday May 6. I am to be in Boston Thursday May 6 and in Washington May 8 through Monday May 10 and in Philadelphia May 11 through May 14, first at a meeting of judges then at a meeting of the American Law Institute. Wouldn’t the best plan be to meet in New York at 7 PM May 7 and for me to take the night train to Washington?

    Faithfully, Charles.

  • Dear Charles,

    Many thanks for your letter.

    1)         I was not tired on Sunday and not the least bit sorry that we stayed out so late. I enjoyed our conversation thoroughly.

    2)         My hair stood on end with distress, when I read that you are reading “the Valley of Decision.” I did not say you should read it and I would not have wanted you to start your “fiction reading career” with this second-rate, mediocre book. True, I was fascinated by it while I read it, but I noticed already then, and certainly from its after taste that. it is not a good book. The weakest spots are the “love idyll” in the swimming shack and the last part in Europe especially CSR. Maybe that is the part which I can check best (that is why I know that it is poor, while you can judge the labor and union part). As to the human beings, I do find Mary, William, Paul and Constance convincing and alive characters. All the others are rather weak. Next time when I see you, I shall tell you about a kind of Mary whom I knew. Please don’t judge my literary taste from this book, I did not recommend it to you!

    3)         As I am coming back from Richmond on the same night, I agree with you that Friday May 7th 7 p.m. is the best. If mother and father should decide that they would like us for dinner at home, that is OK with you, isn’t it?

     

    I am having another holiday on Monday and Tuesday. So you see there is some advantage in being “a good Jew”! Both Seder evenings were very lovely.

    Your schedule for May sounds pretty tough. Don’t work too hard.

    I am looking forward to May 7th.

    So long! Gisela.

  • 4 WORTHINGTON ROAD BROOKLINE MASSACHUSETTS

    Monday, April 25, 1943.

    Dear Gisela,

    It has struck me that you might send a reply to me at The St. Botolph Club. That's a place I don't frequent, and you could more easily reach me at the Courthouse or here. Neither my secretary nor I need hardly add, my mother opens mail with a handwritten envelope; but my secretary, so you would benefit from her training, is somewhat more prompt than my mother in forwarding letters if I am out of town, so I generally have mail sent to the Courthouse.

    I finished Valley of Decision. It was not a book, though I thought the camera too large. In a way I can understand the importance Paul and Mary attached to the family mill. Institutions and the sentiment they arouse are no small part of what makes us civilized. And yet the aim of civilization is an enrichment of the spiritual side of man, so that the appeal of authority and tradition must not be allowed to overbalance the appeal of liberty and individualism. Somewhere, I believe it was in a lecture by Werner Jaeger (do you know that great refugee now at Harvard formerly at Berlin?) I have seen an illuminating comparison made between Roman authority and Greek authority: the former was based on collective reason, embodied in historical tradition; the latter, on creative individual personalities, the pioneers of new knowledge. Mary was too much of a Roman for me.

    We have had spring for three days. And the birds are not the only ones who are singing. I could hardly get up the will to go to lecture to my last class at college; and after having done so I walked, none too quickly you may be sure, to my chambers down town. The best of the part of town where I live is that whether the destination be courtroom or classroom there is a walk along the river,—the basin which you say is not like Hamburg.

    I hope that you will be a week from next Friday. What say you, if it's spring-like, to a carriage ride around Central Park after dinner?

    Faithfully, Charles.

  • April 27, 1943.

    Dear Gisela,

    Do you have personal irrational superstitions? One of mine has to do with the number 27. I should not now allow the number seriously to affect any decision, but from the time I was a child I have had an unjustifiable pleasure in associating the things or personas I like with 27. And that is why I am glad that today, the 27th, I had a letter from you saying that the 7th of may will be all right. [Of course I am aware that if I had not left my chambers early yesterday I would have heard from you on the 26th. -But you know that the essence of magic is to overlook such prosaic explanations.

    From your paragraph numbered 3 (and, by the way, do you use that practice of numbering paragraphs as a result of association with foreign ministers or languages, - I have the habit too, thouigh I sometimes find it accents what you have already discovered is a trait of formalism that I tend to overdevelop) I am not quite clear what you would like to do Friday evening the seventh. - I shall be glad to take my cue from you with only these limitations: because of a hearing here I cannot get to your apartment much before 7 PM Friday; and, because of the meeting in Washington, I must leave around midnight. I shall be glad to take you to dinner at the restaurant you suggest last time [was it The Penthouse?] or The Barbary Room (which I'm now discovering is on 52nd St.), or, if you prefer, dine at your home. And afterwards, as you please, theatre, concert or some better bright idea. If it is to be a theatre or concert give me two choices so I will not get stuck for tickets.

    Now back to Valley of Decision for a moment. Don't be alarmed, as I dashed through that book, especially the pages on Europe, and am now taking an antidote in the shape of Courfied's translation of Plato's Republic. I try to avoid being a humbug in my reading; and I am well aware of the extent to which one may choose to be thought scholarly and profound when one is nothing but a snob. Reading the classics is apt to be in my case partly an attempt to make a wider background for my professional work. But that is only part of the story. I really like reading about the classics (what Murray or Jowett or Livingstone write) and I try, not always successfully, to get the same sort of zest from direct contact with the classics in translation. Reading the original is unfortunately beyond me. I did not take Greek in school and within a year or two ago I picked up a Greek grammar and started to teach myself & did not have the energy to go through more than a lesson or two.

    I should, in fairness, complete the story by saying that just as some people are snobs about pretending to like the classics others are hypocrites in pretending not to like them. A few months ago one evening when we were at home doing nothing in particular my sister and I read aloud a play of Sophocles. I suppose we were both rather shy about it and would have stumbled over some sort of excuse if anyone had detected us. And yet I continue to say we both enjoyed it: like so many other simple pleasures and genuine emotional reactions of joy, it is the sort of thing which gets suppressed as we grow sophisticated. But then the art of life is to find a dwelling place which is neither so exotic as The Savoy or so unreal as Marie Antoinette’s Trianon.

    Faithfully, Charles.

  • April 30th, 1943 300 Park Ave.

    Dear Charles,

    Many thanks for your two letters. You are right to comment on my 'numbering' paragraphs. It is due partly to deterioration from too much business correspondence & partly to a passion for logical order.

    Of course I have illogical superstitions. I remember that when we had tests at school I would walk up the stairs by taking two at a time & if I came out even that would be a lucky omen. (And of course I cheated, for I knew which would automatically come out even!)

    On second thought I decided that it would be nice if we would not make any set plans for Friday night, but leave it to mood, weather & spur of the moment what we would do. I hope this will meet your approval. I shall be ready by 7 p.m.

    I think you will have to take my introduction into the reading of the classics in hand. Especially English classic literature my knowledge consists of gaps.

    I am eager to hear your expert judgement on the coal-mine strike. My instinct tells me that Lewis is a stinker. I am glad you are not on the War Labour Board. It must be depressing to be so completely dis-regarded. Their position looks a little bit like the League of Nations.

    To-morrow I am off for Cleveland & then Glenville.

    I am looking forward to May 7th.

    So long,

    Gisela

  • 4 WORTHINGTON ROAD BROOKLINE MASSACHUSETTS

    Sunday, May 16, 1943.

    Gisela darling,

    Let us go on talking from where we left off in Central Park. There are a great many more things that I should like to say, and though I am sure I shall not get them all on paper, I shall have half the feeling of chatting with you sitting on the grass, and the illusion of being with you.

    Saturday I tried, not at all successfully, to put into words an explanation of your special charm. Perhaps it is the sort of venture which ought not to be tried at all. For the mystery of a captivating personality is too subtle to be analyzed; and the impression can be caught only by a poetic metaphor. It is as though going out in the morning one breathed the spring in the air.

    The best proof that I failed is that you thought I was vacating the reaction of the typical chairman of a charity meeting,—astonished at your blithe spirit and lithe figure. Oh, I shall not pretend that I am blind either to your gaiety or to your figure! Or that I do not now have a warming smile as I picture both. But I was seeking to express something more. Of course, I was not then considering and am not now referring to your admirable composure and your efficient dignity. I was thinking of you as a girl, - and particularly of two different aspects of your loveliness. When I saw you first in Boston in December and then again a few weeks later at your family dinner table, my first thought was what a sweet, affectionate, graceful little girl, - just like I'd like my grown-up daughter to be. The way Romney would have painted an English lass.

    But that was only one of the facets. Another you let me see later, - a side of which I had no glimpse at the start, and which perhaps you quite intended that I should not see too soon. By this I do not imply your adherence to any conventional gambit. Rather I mean that you have the unerring instinct that wraps passion in modesty, at least at the outset, and thus preserves the attraction of both. Most people either flaunt or deny their deepest instincts. It is the rarest good fortune to have the full measure of a profound yearning, the vital sway and rhythm to fulfill that yearning and yet the sense of proportion to make it a major but not an exclusive concern.

    What I have written leaves much unsaid. And yet I could not say even this much had we not been so open with one another. Most of our lives we spend in emotional solitary confinement. And indeed the older we grow the more likely we are to have adopted a protective covering of isolationism. But it is not the doctrine of our first choice. And I frankly rejoice in the breach of the doctrine that we have at least begun. The best of love is that it casts aside the restraints of loneliness and makes it possible for deep to touch deep.

    This, darling, is the "peep" I could not quite get out in the taxi its other night. And yet, Gisela, dearest little girl, I am not sure I did not sum it up as well when I said "I love you."

    Adoringly,

    Charles

  • Tuesday May 18th 1943

    Charles,

    I am waiting for a meeting to assemble and rather than wait any longer for an hour of real leisure, I want to answer your dear letter which came yesterday. I am glad that we are a long way of "My dear Miss W." and "My dear Judge." But Charles, I would hate you to have a dream vision of me. 1) There is, I am afraid very little of an "English class" in me, I can't even say that I would consider her my ideal. 2) and more serious: I had you call my modesty and reservedness is really neither nor. It is a mixture of 2 things. One of which, is the reason I gave you when we sat on the Bench in the Park, the other one a deep seated scare to give myself to anything or anybody 100% — I have only done that in the above mentioned case —

    May 19th Wednesday

    This letter has been interrupted. It seems unbelievable that I honestly have not had a minute's time, all the less believable when I wanted you so much, to have an answer and let you know how much your letter meant to me. I feel all the worse as I always maintain that when you want to do something badly enough you always find the time

  • UNITED STATES COURT
    BOSTON

    CHAMBERS OF
    CHARLES E. WYZANSKI, JR.
    DISTRICT JUDGE

    May 21, 1943.

    Gisela dear-

    I want you to know that I had your special delivery air-mail at the crack of dawn this morning. Indeed now it's only 9.10 AM and I have just time to say thank you before I go in to court. - I haven't really digested all your letter. Perhaps you have heard of a book by Mortimer Adler Learning How to Read, which on the whole is a rather silly performance but which has one memorable simile. It says the way to read a book is the way one reads a letter from a loved one: - forty times over, each time trying to guess at the exact shade of meaning of every word. I haven't put your letter through such hoops yet; and perhaps you'll say that you did not invite any such circus.

    You know I quite understand what you say about wanting to write, believing that there is always time to do anything one wants, and yet not writing. I had just that experience with you two weeks ago. For, if there is one thing I did not want was to let Friday two weeks ago (the 7th) stand in unacknowledged isolation for a week afterwards. - I don't like to kiss a girl I love and leave it so that she doesn't know I really meant to kiss her, and didn't just get carried away by the moonlight, the park bench and, if you please, the spell of the moment. But I didn't write you the next day, or even send you a spring flower. And so I know something about inconsistency on a rather deeper scale than your just taking a day or two to answer my letter.

    I'll tell you something more about you and Romney. You think of different. Look at the wisps of hair, and the finger tips in the portraits—and don't regret arousing a feeling of affection for pure feminine delicacy and grace—I didn't say you were "sweet, simple and girlish", or I did not intend to. I meant that you are lovable. And that is a wonderful quality which girls that one can love passionately don't always (or perhaps usually) have.

    I have been wondering whether you will be free on Saturday the 29th or Sunday the 30th so that I could meet you for a day in the country.—I should like to be with just you. Otherwise I should ask if you would let my mother invite you up to Boston over the week-end.—Think about it for a day, and I'll call you on the telephone and get the answer.—Now I don't mean I don't trust you to write. But we can plan better by phone. Before then consider where we shall meet and what sort of outing we'll have. I propose, subject to your complete discretion to vary all details, that I call for you about 9 AM whenever you say; that I have with me a picnic lunch; that we both be dressed appropriately to sit in a boat or on the grass; and that by diligent study of a WPA guide book we shall have selected some spot in New York or Southern Connecticut, perhaps that Bear Mt. reservation as a place to go [I guess it will have to be by train] for an outing.

    With apologies for subjecting you to an illegible scrawl. But with a feeling of special elation which comes from starting off the day by getting a letter from you.

    Lovingly,

    Charles.

  • Friday night 7:30 p.m.

    Charles,

    That was strange. I had just decided to write you a note. I felt like talking to you and proving to you that when I have a moment I do want to write—when the bell rang & your special delivery note arrived. Thank you, darling, for this Superprompt reply—

    Now to your suggestion: I dare not go away the next week-end. As you know we are moving to-morrow to the country. On Sunday I have to come to town because I have to speak twice, my aunt will be very cross about that and I am sure would be very upset if I were not to be at home at least the following week-end. You know the joke of one Jew meeting another Jew who is in such good spirits, which rather amuses the other fellow who has such a lot of "zores". So, he says: But [...] don't you have any mishpoche? That's me.

    Do you understand that kind of good Jewish humour? The following week-end is Father's Birthday. That would not be any good either. So, I am afraid the week-end situation is none too good right now. Any week-day I could probably manage if you give me fair notice in advance.

    You corrected "treating" you with this letter into subjecting. But your first instinct was right. Your letter was a treat.

    Next time you'll see me I shall be far more "precious". Why? I spent two hours at the dentist where I am getting a giant gold filling.

    Sleep well, dear.

    Goodnight.

    Fondly, Gisela

    P.S. I don't know whether I am right in presuming that the court keeps Shabbos. However it seems safer to send the letter home.

  • 4 WORTHINGTON ROAD BROOKLINE MASSACHUSETTS

    Saturday evening, May 22, 1943.

    Gisela darling,

    Brookline postal service, both going and coming, is poor stuff. Your special delivery did not get here until 6.30 P.M., or, of course, I would have followed your suggestion to wait until Monday when you were at your office before telephoning.

    How do you manage to sound so gay and friendly on a telephone? Even on local calls I'm restrained by the mechanics of the apparatus. And on long distance calls I rarely manage to thaw out for more than a weather report.

    I understand about the next few weekends. I can't say I'm glad, or that I wouldn't rather have you rebel at the canons of good manners. But then a fellow who sometimes acts so formally as I do can hardly be heard to complain.

    The trouble is that your tie-ups leave almost no chance for me to see you for three weeks. You see I am scheduled to sit on patent, tax, emergency and criminal cases until about June 16. I am likely not to be in court straight through, but I rarely know in advance when the break will come. And even if I did, I'd like to have the promise of more than two hours with you in New York before I took the trip there and back. What is the first time I can have a whole day? — [If you put it off too far, I'll admit I'll take less time at an earlier date.]

    Wasn't Churchill's speech first-rate? It knows how to handle legislative assemblies: some new facts; a prediction that is not quite a promise; the gusts of adventure; the rhetoric of the historical plays of Shakespeare — and all in the grand manner of an essay by Macaulay, but leavened with humor. We have never had such an orator here, at least since Webster.

    I didn't know you were a friend of Allan, or as I call him "Bill", Snoock. His older brother, Bob, who died, was a good friend of my sister's and a classmate of mine. Bill is much less of a fellow inside; but much more for show. He's got abilities of no mean order; but no one is required to discover them for himself.

    I almost engaged in the sort of activities that interested you on Wednesday evening last. Mr. Lincoln Filene had the Board of the Beth Israel Hospital dined with the Deans of the Medical Schools of Harvard and Tufts and some leading Christian and Jewish doctors to discuss the role of the hospital as a teaching institution in conjunction with medical schools. — And on Monday with the other judges, the Governor, the Mayor etc. I attended what is called a good-will dinner for Jews and Christians. — In these meetings I serve as a pure figurehead. I don't feel altogether hypocritical for there is a duty to go, and I cannot see that I am motivated by the notion of being personally rewarded. But if you asked me whether I suppose that much is achieved at these gatherings, I should have to fall back on a remark which I believe Lord Acton made. Since Machiavelli's time no one has dared to make a public profession of bad faith; and that has by itself operated to advance public morals. Of course, Acton didn't know the Nazis and like 20th Century phenomena. If he had, he would have had to change the form of his statement, but he would have been able to buttress with new citations his notion that saying you love mankind has something to do with loving mankind, and vice versa.

    I have a notion to write you some views regarding the word "modesty". I just took a look in my 13 volume Oxf. Eng. Dict. and find that the 3rd sense in which it is used includes "scrupulous chastity of thought, speech and conduct." You probably concluded that I was employing the word in that restricted sense. The primary sense, I see from the same authority, is "freedom from excess or exaggeration". Whatever I may originally have meant, I'll now choose to stand on that definition as the one that's appropriate. So what say you to that pedantry?

    With fondest love - Affectionately - Charles.

  • Sunday 9.30 a.m.

    Charles,

    I am sitting at the White Plains Station—a bundle of furious despair. I did not have a time table & the information my cousin gave me was wrong. I missed the train I should have had and I am going to be late at my Sunday School—so I'm trying to pipe down & console myself by writing to you.—You must have wondered why I wrote you not to call me in White Plains. Telephoning in that castle of a house is a cause of friction only, because you can be sure that when you talk somebody else lifts another extension, is furious that the line is not free and happily cusses in. Even worse now the extensions had to be cut down so that the victim has to be found and brought from the other end of the house. I have made it a rule to do my telephoning in town. It was therefore funny that when I arrived in the country Aunt Freda told me with a reproachful face that there had already been a call for me. Was that how I was starting the summer, couldn't I do my telephoning unless it was becoming urgent in town? Don't feel badly dear, I thought it was funny, how could you have known!

    Now, as to our date. You can take your choice of any day of the week between May 31st - June 4th except for Wednesday where we have Nat. Board Meeting. I might even decide to stay out that day and you come to W.P. We have ample space to retire - the place is huge unless you prefer somewhere else & unless there should be a hell of a lot of work which would require my presence at the office at least for a few hours.

    I had a painful discussion with father yesterday along the line I told you about in the Park. I told him everything and the worst was I was sharp, much too excited & aggressive and now I am sorry and it probably didn't help.

    What! Do you say about Lewis latest moves & Stalin. The poor Trotskyites. That must be an awful blow for them.

    To-day because I must go into town, the weather is glorious. I am afraid I am not in "blithe spirits." Don't reread this letter, it isn't worth it.

    Fondly, Gisela

  • United States Courts Boston Monday, May 24, 1943. 4 P.M.

    Gisela dear,

    Your cousin who gave you the wrong train information is a friend of mine. I have nothing like the energy to make use of the odd moments in the railway terminal—and I certainly am not usually forehanded enough to carry note paper with me. But then I'm delighted that you're different.

    The first point is that as to our date my calendar has these fixed barriers. Now I am trying a patent case against General Motors which will last through Wednesday. Thursday I am to wear top hat and tails in my capacity as what they call a "marshal" at Harvard Commencement, the job is like being an usher at a funeral or wedding, an honor indistinguishable in its duties from those of any other liveried servant. Friday, May 28 I should be free, but I take it you are not. And the same goes for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Then Tuesday June 1 through Friday June 4 I am to be ready to try criminal cases for violation of war regulations. I would wager a pretty penny that the trial list breaks down and the District Attorney will not keep me busy, but all that is unpredictable. Friday evening June 4th and I must go to Exeter to a Trustees' meeting, Sunday the 6th I'm free, but you're busy. The 7th which is Monday I have emergency and motion business; Tuesday the 8th and Wednesday the 9th an admiralty matter is scheduled; Thursday the 10th is set for reorganization of an insurance company and later in the day and perhaps in to Friday the 11th I have a building contractor's bond to adjudicate. So you see that it is not until June 12 Saturday that I have an absolutely clear day when you are not tied up (unless perhaps this Friday May 28 is an exception.)

    To reduce the above to a real choice:

    (1) Are you free May 28 in the evening for dinner and later?

    (2) Would you like to come to Boston for the week-end of Saturday June 12 - Sunday June 13 or rather Friday morning June 11 - Sunday June 13? We have no castle, but there's room enough. Moreover, there are two little children who may disturb your morning slumber but whom you will otherwise find likeable and reasonably considerate (I really can say better than that for them, but their father being in the army and their mother with him in California, I feel "in loco parentis" and hence restrained by the proprieties.) If this choice appeals to you, I know Mother would be delighted to ask you.

    (3) Would you rather I come to N.Y. the week-end of the 12th-13th. If this is so, let's not get on to complications about my bothering your aunt who does not sound to me the least bit frightening, but who is exactly like any natural human being who is an aunt, has a large establishment, and loves deeply her family but not all her family's peculiar friends with idiosyncratic habits.

    That brings me back to your letter and the telephone. To me nothing less needs explanation than a desire for a fair degree of privacy. With me indeed it's a fetish, and the chief cause for my resenting living at home, which I don't really need to do, but continue to do out of apathy. Last year I lived in an apartment on Beacon Hill, but I gave it up when I went to Washington in the summer to work for Lend-Lease, and I never got around to taking another flat. Also I got somewhat panicky over the problem of hiring and keeping a domestic servant in the present market.

    Our talks about John Lewis show that neither of us is able to predict much of what he'll do. I am convinced that he will get a substantial wage increase for his miners; that he will not lose face; and that in 1944 he'll be backing an isolationist Republican for the presidency. What the interstitial movements to these goals will be, I haven't any idea.

    As to Stalin my attitude is exactly the same as it is to the Southern reactionary Democrats. So long as they go my way I'm glad to have their help; but I have no notion that we think alike or that they would care for my company except as temporary partners in politics or war.

    Of course, I believe that the honey-drip of Southern hypocrisy is more nauseating than the blood and bludgeon of Stalin. But I can't suppose that Stalin feels anything like the sort of moral code which actuates, to take a dreadful example, an English sportsman. And personally I'll confess that, I like the sort of people who have a code founded on something other than immediate interest and who will not join up with Hitler or betray revolutionary associates because at the moment it seems advantageous. I don't know how to play in a game that has no rules; and so I like the rules. Nietzsche would scorn me. And vice versa.

    This does not imply that I adhere in theory, much less in practice, to copy-book maxims. Anyone who sits in a lawyer's or doctor's office knows that the maxims are oversimplified generalizations which it is impossible to accept without qualification. All I suggest is that whatever version of a maxim you take, and however it be modified to cover your needs, it is for you a principle, and that you are willing to be guided by it. From the above it looks to me as though it is not you, dear, but I who should have gone to Sunday School yesterday. Instead I went to a motion picture, Charles Laughton in This Land Is Ours, which I thought excellent, despite my prejudice against war pictures.

    With fondest love, dear little girl, from Charles.

  • Charles,— I am writing you on this beautiful scrap of paper during the Board meeting. I want to tell you how much I appreciate your thoughtfulness & consideration—thank you, dear. I am looking forward to Monday. Speaking Board language—I have already a lot of trips on the "Agenda" that I want to talk to you about.

    In a minute one of the most unpleasant discussions is going to start. A vote on a delegate to be sent to P. The reasons that will be given will be factual when under the surface the reasons will be political & personal. I dread this ugly performance.

    We are approaching the subject. The atmosphere is anyhow not too inviting to the kind of letter I would like to write, so you have to read between the lines.

    Faithfully yours,

    Gisela.

    Wednesday afternoon.

  • United States Court

    Boston

    Wednesday, May 26, 1943.

    Gisela darling,

    We've done it! At last we have a date, and I am looking forward to Monday the 31st. Of course, I don't altogether regret the obstacles since they served as a pretext for letters and telephone calls. And who, (least of all who when he's in love,) regrets the barriers he overcomes.

    Shall I begin by telling you that, last evening, I went for a walk along the Charles River basin just to think about you? The twilight on spring; and the blue gray clouds gradually turning dark; the water lapping on the shores; the youngsters walking arm and arm waiting for the dusk before they sit on the covered benches—all these were a setting for pictures of you.

    I know that you will remind me that across my camera I must draw some cabalistic signs of warning. "Do you remember that I said in the Park that 'we are playing with fire'; and that 'there's someone else aged 43'. And then again the pointed signal 'only once did I give myself 100 per cent'."

    To be sure I remember. But I am not the least bit scared. Those are challenges, not frightening portents. I wonder what sort of fairy could have made you attractive, charming and lovable today if you weren't so yesterday! In even the most jealous moments a lover knows that his beloved could not be quite so perfect if this were the first time that either one of them was in love.

    If I were to make a catalog of objections I should begin somewhere else; and most certainly not with the fact that you are deeply fond of someone that I don't know. And it might be a long catalog. Some of the principal items I'm some hour going to discuss with you. That will not be a detached, objective accountant's summary of assets and liabilities, and an attempt to strike a balance. I have no notion that I could, and in any event no desire to be, a judge in my own case. So you may prepare for an advocate. And I am frankly going to be the sort that appears with candor to admit the shortcomings of his own case, but, warn you, only for the purpose of creating for his strong points a more effective chiaroscuro. — Do you know that saying of Mr. Justice Holmes, "Candor is the best form of deception"?

    Talking of Holmes, I have been reading some of the unpublished parts of the correspondence of Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock. My secretary did the work for the editor of the published parts and she also has the unused scraps ,to which I have had access. They are not much to boast of, but the printed correspondence is another story. I regard it as just the best correspondence in the English language for this century. Despite its constant reference to legal points, the main theme is the exchange of views on important ideas by two of the most cultivated gentlemen our society has produced. — I dislike burdening someone else with my notions of what is interesting reading, and I feel no confidence that Holmes or Pollock would hit your taste, but if you would care to turn the pages, and skip what you regard as barbaric technicalities, I should be delighted to send you a copy. — I don't want to embarrass you by pressing the point, for I have a certain shyness about trying to influence the intellectual interests of others.

    This has been the sort of foggy day when I have been doubly conscious that my chambers are within ear shot as well as view of the harbor. I am on the 15th floor and face the bay so that I see somber gray convoys, and the white gleam of the Boston lighthouses and the constant passage through the air of planes and balloons on the look-out for enemy craft. The fog horns and the toots of tugs make a pleasant reminder that we are a sea-town and I am invested with the ancient admiralty jurisdiction.

    While I was writing this I had a call from one of the assistant United States attorneys who tells me of the discrimination in his office under which prosecutions are being brought more rapidly against Jewish OPA violators than against Irish OPA violators. This is the sort of charge which I always examine twice. But this time I regretfully have concluded that the discrimination exists. You may tell me that such problems are of relatively less consequence than those familiar to Europe. And yet I rather suppose you would not say that, for you would be aware that the drawing of unwieldy distinctions in the presentation of cases to a court of justice is one of the most pernicious attacks upon the social fabric. Yet, strangely enough, it is the sort of attack which judges can do almost nothing to control. The prosecutor initiates cases; he selects by whatever standard he deems right; and the judge tries only those that are selected. To be sure if the bias of the prosecutor were apparent, the jury might comment in open court or might refuse to impose heavy penalties on those who had been singled out for trial. But the bias would need to be crystal clear, since otherwise the jury would be letting off an admittedly guilty man on account of a social delinquency of the prosecutor.

    Need I tell you, darling, that I'm looking forward eagerly to Monday - when we can talk without the doubtful assistance of telephones and fountain pens.

    Lovingly, Charles.

  • Woodlands White Plains, N.Y.

    Thursday night.

    Charles,

    I have gone upstairs to write my speech for tomorrow night. I have to speak from the pulpit on: "The place of Jewish women in the Post War World." Can you imagine anybody saying anything but plain hot air on such a ghastly topic. So with Scarlett (Gone with the Wind) I say: "I'll think about it 'to-morrow'" just because I haven't got one sensible thought on that subject in my head and instead shall enjoy talking to you for a while.

    I still don't know whether the court observes the Shabbos, so to be on the safe side, I'll send this letter special delivery to your home.

    Charles, you are not only smart; you are a psychological genius in your reaction to my "pearls of wisdom" which you underlined when you quoted them in your letter. I wish I had such simple, sound straight-forward instinctive reactions.

    Holmes' quotation is brilliant. I am going to remember it. Of course I would like to read the book which fascinated you, and I shall try my darnedest to understand & grasp what fascinated you. I have always had the theory "my friends must be the friends of my friends" and so of books.

    Of course I am upset about the discrimination in the OPA. I am unfortunately deeply convinced that WSA is leading for an awful wave of antisemitism and those are uncanny (?) proofs & beginnings. Each country has its own brand of antisemitism, so this is a different form. More about that orally.

    I sunteed several times yesterday when I thought of your really funny parallel of "the right attitude towards the fact that you are a Jew." Thy wise words seemed rather silly then, but the parallel may not be so bad. Once you have come to peace with sex — you probably feel exactly the way I feel about my Judaism.

    Gisela, stop talking nonsense and get to work. ---

    I am looking forward to Monday, come bright & early. There is a train leaving N.Y. at 9:15 a.m. arriving at 9:50 and one at 10:20 a.m., arriving 10:55. (That is the Sunday schedule which should be the same on a holiday.) If I shouldn't hear to the contrary from you, I shall expect you at 10:55 at the station. To spend that same time is a sign of real love—if it were a regular Monday I would go too. So, don't feel badly and it will be nice. (9:15 on a holiday is too early for you.)

    So it's 10:55 at the White Plains Station on Monday.

    Forgive this scrawl, I left my fountain pen at the office.

    So long.

    Truly yours, Gisela.

    P.S. I was all wrong! Sunday and holiday is not identical. So, I am now suggesting an awful train, but as father has to go to town on Monday I can take him to the station when I call for you. So here is the train:

    Leaving N.Y. Gr.C. 9:47 a.m. Arriving W.P. 10:48

    It is an awfully slow train, but you won't mind, will you, it gives you a chance to read the N.Y. Times thoroughly.

  • 4 WORTHINGTON ROAD BROOKLINE MASSACHUSETTS

    Saturday, May 29, 1943 2:15 P.M.

    Gisela darling,

    I shall take this letter in town to mail in the hope it will get to White Plains before I do. I shall take the 9:47 a.m., as you suggest, and arrive at White Plains at 10:48 a.m.; or, at any rate, shall be at that White Plains depot by quarter to eleven.

    Your special delivery, mailed on Thursday evening, arrived here at noon Saturday. It is just a lucky chance that I have seen it today. Contrary to my usual week-end custom, I went to my chambers today. There were some letters I wanted to see. On the way home, walking along the street, I was overtaken by Carl Dreyfus who suggested that we should lunch together. Ordinarily perhaps I should have answered that my intention was to go to a tennis court. But I couldn't resist having a chance to talk with someone who not only knew you, but introduced me to you. And that side trip has given me your letter, dear, several hours earlier.

    I hope your Friday speech from the pulpit was top notch. The test with me in making speeches is whether at the end I have that tired, yet somewhat radiant, sensation of having climbed to the top and let it go full blast at the end. That is, a sort of feeling of having put forth everything to reach a high level, and then had the sense to cut it off sharp.

    Thursday I had what I suspect may seem to anyone not reared in Boston an absurd degree of satisfaction in the result of the Overseers' election at Harvard. Each year by popular ballot all Harvard alumni who have had degrees for more than 5 years vote to select five so-called Overseers from a list of a dozen candidates nominated by the Alumni Association and other candidates added by petition. These elected serve for 6 years (together with those elected in like manner in previous years) as a sort of board of trustees of Harvard. The Overseers together with the President, the Treasurer and five permanent fellows of the College, are entrusted with general policy questions, approval of faculty appointments and supervision of the entire university.

    I was, as I think I told you, delighted to have been nominated, but I had no thought of being elected, as only two other Jews, so far I know, (Walter Lippmann and Judge Julian W. Mark) have ever secured the thousands of votes which are necessary for election. To my great astonishment, the poll this year showed that Ambassador Grew, Governor Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Ralph Lowell (head of the Lowell institute and a Boston financier), Roger Lapham of San Francisco (Chairman of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company) and I were elected. We ran ahead of fellows like Crawford, President of the National Manufacturers' Association, G. Howland Shaw, Assistant Secretary of State, Bishop Loring of Maine, and Keith Kane, former Harvard captain, partner in Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, and now head of the Department of Justice's counter-espionage division.

    Frankly I don't understand it. Part of the vote can be explained by the fact that probably minority groups are glad once in a while to have an outsider in the seats of the mighty. Also Harvard men are apt to respect the office of judge. But, whatever the full explanation, I cannot hide my silly pleasure at having stood well in the eyes of several thousand fellows who were brought up in my alma mater. — At the same time I have the sense, I hope, to know that it is even more important to be able to stand against just such fellows when they through conservative tradition or inertia block the full flowering of the liberal arts tradition and the universal realization of the promise of American life. — At the moment their willingness in an era of rising anti-Semitism to elect a Jew is a pretty good sign of their tolerance in action.

    I look forward to Monday morning, to Monday afternoon, to Monday evening, dear little girl,

    Lovingly, Charles.

  • Gisela darling,

    Let’s call it Memorable Day instead of Memorial Day! I had no idea that there were going to be so many minutes in the day that I should want to live over again and again. – Perhaps I have already had an advance sample for I spent a large part of what is called the night in day dreaming.

    I should now like to tell you some of the pleasantest part of what I was thinking. But perhaps on that score you already have a sufficient echo. Each time I see you, one of the strongest impressions I have is that you are such a distinctive and yet such a lovable person. In the first place most humans, and especially most girls, are not in any real sense distinctive personalities. They reflect the convention of their group, and they seem mere notes for a group song. You are integrated and therefore a distinctive person. – What is even rarer, you are not outlined by hardness. So often in becoming a person, one emphasizes the lines which are barriers. With you there seems nothing more natural than to walk hand in hand.

    And yet I also want briefly to touch on some other reflections I had as I tossed during the night.

    I am somewhat afraid. And I have found that one of the best ways to deal with fear is to pull the light on and look at what pretends to be a bogey man. Of course, if it’s really a monster he’ll shoot! But if it’s only a shade rustling in the wind it will look a sick green. Anyway let’s take the gamble and look.

    I told you I would be afraid if you were Midas-rich. I am not sure that despite the fact that you are, as I truly meant, completely unspoiled, I’m not still somewhat timid on that account. For estates are to me prisoners of the spirit. They generally try to bring you in to their captive chain gang and make you work for them. Especially if like myself, one has an enjoyment of luxury. I’m no ascetic in any field. And the tempter has an easy path to my door.

    Nonetheless it isn’t that of which I am chiefly afraid. It’s number one and two on what you playfully called our agenda.

    Number one I do not fear as a rival. That isn’t conceit. (Nor may I quickly add is it absence of jealousy; for I have enough man in me to intend to run for the blue ribbon in any race when you offer the loving cup as the prize!) The reason I fear number one is that I give you credit for having good judgment, and for having an instinctively sound guess as to what you want. And it looks as if you might decide that what you most want is a fellow who will actively share your chief temporal interests, and the future of the Jews in Palestine or elsewhere. – If that’s what you do want awfully badly, you would be taking a long, and I should almost guess a losing gamble with me. You understand I shall not be perverse; but I suspect that my path is cut deep in other ways.

    And that brings us to number two. Well, first of all, I have an oblique attack on that issue. What bothers me is the sort of normalcy characterized by my present way of life in Boston. Sometimes, indeed oftener than I reveal, I rebel at it myself. – This is quite apart from the war and my feeling that I just now lead too protected a life. – A lot of the happiness of loving someone else is sharing excitement, danger, privation, suspense and, oh the hope you can make the improbable come true! – That’s one of the reasons it’s harder for the rich to be happy in marriage. And it’s one of the reasons it would be harder for anyone as secure in his job and his conventional ways as I now am to challenge the tow of us to our best. Just as nations often find their true mettle in the adversity of war, so perhaps couples need some of that struggle with the outside world to pull together best. – Oh, I know that it’s just as important to win the peace, and indeed it’s a harder challenge. But it’s the sort that twosomes, like nations, are less apt to make a good job of. They don’t seem to stand the full horn of plenty so well and they don’t act under a sufficient compulsion, when it’s all on the inside.

    This is pessimistic chatter, isn’t it? Maybe you’ll charge it off to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad? But it isn’t all without sense – and it disturbs me because it ties in to so much that we touched upon.

    Of course, we touched other things too, and let’s be happy in that.

    Tonight I shall go and make careful observations of Mrs. Sharp. Report to be filed later. Good morning, darling. Lovingly, Charles.

Peter Sauter
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Gisela’s 1929 Gymnasium Thesis, “Zionism and its developments so far” (Translated to English from the original German)