COVE

18 December 1951
New York City

My dearest Margaret,

I was thinking of you, of course I was, when I wandered into B. Altman’s this week. Not with any clear intention really, just trying to escape the cold and perhaps find a nice ribbon for my sister’s parcel. As I was going to the wrapping section of the store, I came across a beautiful little book someone had left misplaced. Beautiful indeed, rust-colored cloth cover, golden stars quietly twinkling on a black buckram spine, and a little Shakespeare medallion pressed into the cover. I couldn’t help it and smiled right there in the aisle. She’ll love this, I thought. You’ve always had an eye for these things, especially the well-made ones.

It’s a new edition printed this year, though you wouldn’t know it by the binding. Feels like something from an older, finer shelf. I had to look twice when I saw what it was, a Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. But before you raise an eyebrow, yes, I do remember that you already own one. And I remember you telling me it had “exactly seventy-five quatrains” and that that’s how you knew it was FitzGerald’s first translation. Well, this one has seventy-five as well. So it seems, by sheer chance or perhaps fate, that you now have two versions of the same beloved text.

But besides its finer appearance, this edition is the one illustrated by Edmund J. Sullivan! I know his work from the Carlyle volumes and from some of his Shakespeare scenes. Such a great artist I must say, his drawings here are wild and so intricate, full of curling vines, celestial diagrams, skeletal trees, and strange mystics waving wands at silent audiences. They are just so ornate, symbolic and full of movement… I think you’ll find them compelling. You’ve always loved when images do more than just decorate, when they sharpen the meanings of the words.

And the production itself Margaret, it’s frankly a bit posh. The pages are thick, faintly yellowed even though they’re brand new, the text is spaced like something meant to be savored, the top edge is gilded, and the whole thing feels more like a keepsake than a book. I asked the clerk who published it (silly of me as it is right there in the first page, I’m aware, you know how I am when I get excited) and all she could tell me was “Shakespeare House” and an address uptown. I’ve never heard of them before, and no one I asked seems to know much else. Probably it’s one of those postwar publishing ghosts, making a few finely tailored books for those of us who still care for paper and ink.

I remember when we read it the first time, so many years ago. Being honest, I was feeling quite nostalgic that night so I decided to give this one a quick look, just a few pages really. I curled up beside the radiator, sipping from a hot cocoa cup when I found myself stopping at a quatrain I remember you liking, XLIII: “The Grape that can with Logic absolute/ The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute…” You laughed when you first read that, your kind of joke, I think. Religious dogma and its ineptitude at seeking joy, all tangled up in twelve words. I marked the page for you.

Later I lingered for a moment in the very last quatrain: “And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass / Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on The Grass, / And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot / Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!”

You’ve always had such a graceful way of thinking about endings… not as absences, but as part of the rhythm, new beginnings. This one felt like that. I think you’ll like it even more with Sullivan’s illustration, such a lovely piece: A calm garden scene, and we see a woman standing while the others drink and play music. Her goblet is turned gently upside down, as if to say, I was here. And now I go. But she doesn’t look mournful. She looks... aware. A little apart, but never left behind. I thought of you, of course. I think you’ll like that one.

I didn’t inscribe this, wouldn’t dare of course, but if I had, I think I’d have simply written: This book made me think of you, so now it’s yours. 

With love,
Thomas