Woody Guthrie Handwritten and Signed 18 Page Three Times Signed Important Letter.
Autograph letter signed “Woody” three times, 18 pages on 8.5 sheets of lined notebook paper that measures 8 x 10.5 in.
Dated December 18, 1945, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Signed on the bottom of pages 8, 11 and 12. Stapled at the upper corner, neat and bold cursive with folds.
Lower half of final leaf excised with some loss of text, otherwise good condition.
This extraordinary December 1945 letter from Guthrie to his close and often intimate correspondent Charlotte Strauss offers a rare glimpse into his personal life through moving declarations of love for his wife Marjorie, the devastation of his mother’s death “in the pads and cells of the asylum for the insane” (of the same illness, then unknown to Guthrie, that would cause his own death), the contrast of his blunt honesty set against known infidelities, and his loneliness on the Las Vegas air base awaiting his discharge. As biographer Joe Klein notes, Guthrie’s letters, always compelling, now “became a dark, convoluted, and frightening maze in which he spent [this] month of December 1945… He mailed several letters each day, one running into the next” (Guthrie, 315-6). Guthrie and Strauss began writing months earlier—a series of long, passionate letters. Here he discusses their relationship against that of his marriage, his appreciation for Strauss’ praise of his work, and his sense of being “a freight train thinker, a freight ship seaman, a soldier not lost because I couldn’t stay lost two minutes as long as I get your unveiled words every day. You danced up to me out on a hill, you gave me an envelope that made me love you.”
A few excerpts from this lengthy letter:
"Marjorie wants me to get home fast and to perform my several duties as a new married man. Marjorie is a dancer with the Martha Graham Company of modern dancers. She teaches several classes and keeps a new crop of callouses [sic] pushing out the old every day. She is small, black of hair, sound of muscle and mind. She is the best hand with kids that you ever saw, highly sensitive, progressive, and has an equal hold on ancient and revolutionary changes of thought. Her mother, Eliza Greenblatt, is one of the finest of the Yiddish and American poetesses of the beauty for beauty sake generation, not of protest nor militance, nor vigilant, nor much of a fighter, except to shout forth her beauty as she feels it all around her. Marjorie has progressed far along more positive paths than her mother. But has captured all of her mothers [sic] power of expression and pure joy of the fight to build cleaner rooms and dwellers. [page 1]”
"She believes that most wedlocked marriages fail because two mates try to latch every drop of one another's [sic] love and vision up inside some plaster box. She believes that no person lives happy who does not find his self or her self in new love and old love and youngly [sic] spouted love every day in psychic, biological, and economic ways. She knows that she finds all of her love of these sorts in her human grace and movement factory, and she takes such an affair as yours and mine, not as thievery nor suffocation, but as some new budded part of every day. I could not fill any woman with married plan nor bliss, nor listen nor learn her ways and plans unless I wake up, am waked up by you and your thoughts, desires, or new awakenings. [page 2]”
"How could I get into Marjories [sic] deep place unless you let me know yours? How could I know the diseases of the Mexican migrants unless I found out all I could about the dying babies of the southern poor farmer family? How could I feel my full mental right to even face any legal wife in our same room unless I had faced you word for word and mind for mind? I saw this simple fumble wreck my home, send my sister fourteen to a bed of burned suicide, my mother to die in the pads and cells of the asylum for the insane, my father lay for 18 months on a bed where suicide cheated death. What sort of resolves do you suppose that you would make to stand fifteen years as a helpless observer and to see the little fumble wreck like the bomb? While one feels the need to live on your hill the other craves to make a fortune and to fight like a hyena and wolf pack every day to keep it. [page 3]”
"My greatest temptation has been to listen to lonesome running glands of well set sheltered people, male and female, to use my well known name as a key to get me in to eating tables and into beds where sleep rules all the talk. I did not come this far without many meetings of girls like you, but never caught a sociable disease nor made one enemy, even though I did not feel that I could stay... I guess one reason why I’ve come this far without a germ upsetting me is because I used such words and feelings to charge my blood and kill all hopeless germs. I pass by more females than I meet, have not spoken to three since in the army seven months. Yet, there’s something about a guitar and these songs that keeps me practicing hard to beat my feeling. This is the reason why I tell you plain as I can that such letters as I write must go on and up, must always keep on being written. If we meet in ten dark fogs or ten bright lights or on eleven tall hills or never do meet, never exchange photos, never touch, never come within several wide miles of one another, these letters must take the place of all of that, because our letters will burn down and outlast my two dollar carcass and yours. The only gripe from my side of the hill is that you are so stingy with your pages. I not only double yours but I write to Marjorie ten, fifteen, or twenty pages every day about my legal wedded feelings. [page 4]”
"Over there on page three you tell me, ‘Be twenty one with me, because walking and singing in the moonbeams are your specialty’. Well, I’ve sang a good bit more on picket lines, union meetings, street rallies, and on regular peaceable stages and studios than in the moon or its beams. The billy clubs, pistols, brass knuckles of the boss’s caps have greeted me more than the pure undiluted moon. I never was against the beams, nor any planet, but a good job, a fair pay, a clean home, good fixtures, clothes, and a good nursery school to send my kids to has [sic] usually made it easier for a lot of good workers to have the freedom and spiritual pride it takes to entertain the soul under a moonbeam bath. [page 5]"
"I am not afraid to meet you on any clod of dirt you choose, nor am I afraid that we never will meet. I know how I would be after our meeting, because I am a man of many meetings. But if you actually feel that to meet would cause any ounce or spark of worried nerves, or regret, or it would be too hard to part, would even cause a ripple on your lake, than as for me, I’d rather keep you the way I’ve got you now. [page 6]"
"Your last letter has struck me clearest of all. Makes all moves right and makes it move in love, makes all things clean where germs cant [sic] win. Makes me feel like getting up and walking on another piece… [page 7]"
"You owe me no coin of the realm and I will warn you that I have less than two dollars on me right now, which remains way close to my cash balance at all times. I couldn’t even take you to a neon lighted placed, and most likely this will remain the same. It is very true that soulful words arouse bodily desires, but if a meeting might leave you sad or sorrowful, it will never be. [page 8]"
"You wonder if it is possible that such letters as mine could run because Marjorie and I don’t understand one another, fully enough to absorb all of this and so it is just sort of leaking out around the sides. No. This is not the case. It is because we do understand, because she has always been the deepest understander that I have ever met or could ask to meet. Our love life is as close onto perfect as two people of our generation can make it...Don’t let any wrong idea come to you, I mean, that I write over on a separate page and sniffle at your heels because I am sexually or economically lost, nor even confused. You could never find a finer wife than she is, and everybody that sees her says so. [page 9]"
"I did not back down on any mention of sexual words between us, because it would be as wrong to run from sex as it is to run toward it...It is not because I am sex hungry that I write to you, it is to discuss any earthly or special or planetary form of life or its moods and pains that I want to write to you and to hear from you. I am very lonesome here in this army camp…. My letters to Marjorie are as you would expect, of a high temperature from inside my good army fence, and even so, you are always here in your own place. I want you to feel that what I want to do is to help you in any way that I possibly can, toward any goal you hope to reach, and you by your insight into your female world can help me even more. You can teach me as much as I can teach you. And before long we will each one know as much as both of us know. I feel today that our years will drive our sorrows to pile thoughts and pages high. I never have to see you nor lay my hand on you, to feel, to be glad today that we have met here where and like we did. We may be married each a dozen times, and I would feel the same toward you, Charlotte, you understand what I mean, don’t you? [page 10]"
"Most of all, you must not love me in anyway that you could not love a grass, a leaf, a season. I mean, don’t let my pages cause you to feel that Marjorie is the Blessed one while you are only my convenient concubine...Marjorie has told me several times that she feels that mans [sic] full growth and stature is not complete so long as he chains his happiness onto any person, place, or thing, that she could understand how I may even feel the desire to go out and try the lips and ways and theories of any pretty woman, and that the experience no matter if it parted us would be for the growth of all. Actually I feel a lot less likely to take advantage of my freedom which I would break ten times of a week if she had tied me to her wrist on a leather leash... [page 11]"
"...and as far as love of the flesh goes, don’t you really believe that a ten year canyon is too big for you to jump? How could our rhythms [sic] on the physical plane be in such good harmony with so many seasons gone between us? There are five years between Marjorie and mine, which is a lesser problem. [page 12]"
"Its a pity that I am so shy of women or I could have struck up a conversation and been half way out and down a trail. But I never go to dances, nor to parties much of the kind you see around here. I am as scared as a rabbit. I think I’m overly afraid of V.D. [page 13]"
"You seem to tell me that you are lonesome, and I seem to want to do all I can to win out over your lonesomeness, your lonesomeness that is made out of your thirst that husbands never cure and sweethearts never end, lovers never fill, which stays on as the first caller in your walls and stays till your walls are gone. [page 14]"
"But you and I must not be ten years apart in this one thing, our decision to keep on writing these deepest letters. The words got set down slow and at a rolling speed, but not because we bumped into one another at a pub and kissed along the side street, but because there has been in you all of your days this fever to find your mate in your mind. And I could tell you only that I have a wife and a baby and a set of legal marriage papers. But I can’t find any reason to ask you to quit writing your letters. [page 15]"
"Because love is about all there is to poetry, and I will tell Marjorie not once but many times that this love that I feel for Charlotte Strauss is bigger than all of us. It is in your hand. It is your only light. You can love your husband in I hope this same way, but I can’t tell you to stop loving me till you run and get a husband. Now is now. Love is now, and this is now. [page 16]"
"I’m a freight train thinker, a freight ship seaman, a soldier not lost because I couldn’t stay lost two minutes as long as I get your unveiled words every day. You danced up to me out on a hill, you gave me an envelope that made me love you, and if this present love never be filled full, if you would rather dance under my cooler lights of brotherly admiration, so it will be. This will be exactly as your deepest heart tells you. You know. Marjorie knows. I know. I don’t care who all knows. I don’t care if you dance on away and hand your next envelope to some other man. [page 17]"
"I am not rich, most generally broke, because I work for causes more often than for money, but if you need the hand or brain of man in long or short degree to help you at long or short range, then you have hit your right door. You are perfectly right in your decision to do whatever you do do at a slow pace. Think three thoughts and then take one step."" [page 18]
Authentication: Gotta Have Rock and Roll Certificate of Authenticity.
