Skip to main content

A Letter from Sam Shepard to Johnny Dark

Photos courtesy the authors and the Wittliff Collection.

 

From a September 4, 1990 letter from Sam Shepard, who died last week at the age of seventy-three, to Johnny Dark. Shepard and Dark’s forty-plus years of correspondence is collected in Two Prospectors, which was named after their unfinished, cowritten play.

 

Dear John,

Funny I should get your letter on the very same day I’m cleaning out one of my many neglected filing cabinets—full of old letters, manuscripts, notes—piles of papers & I came across your huge book of notes you sent me of our endless dialogues—other letters from you, dating clear back to England & a great black & white photo of the two of us destroying the front porch in Nova Scotia—me leaping off the steps with a hammer & you in the background with bushy black hair like the early Bob Dylan—we look like we’re in High School or something & I thought what a great friendship it was! Truly great. I miss the very same things—just riding around in the white Chevy talking about any old thing that floated into our demented imaginations & then, momentarily, actually becoming characters & acting them out as we wandered through grocery stores or the streets of San Francisco or San Rafael on a brisk stoned afternoon. Somehow, it always reminded me of drunken Irish characters from Flann O’Brien—stumbling from bar to bar, spouting poetry, singing ballads & making up outrageous stories—always in trouble with women & ultimately pathetically alone. I hope some way we can again strike up our own private dialogues—hysterically funny to us only—maybe as very old men on a bus stop or a park bench in some place like Lincoln, Nebraska where we’re equally lost.

I, too, have been going through the same heart-wrenching stuff you describe—(maybe not the same but with the same results) & each time I come out the other end of it I think—aah, at last it’s over—I can get on with my life again but it keeps coming back. I’m convinced now it has nothing to do with women although I make myself believe I wouldn’t feel this way if it wasn’t for “her.”

Writing is such a pain in the ass. I’d like to just talk & maybe walk that’s about it. I’m exhausted from it all. Hope we can find a way to meet up & have a good time one of these days. It would be great to see you. Love to Scarlett & my ex-wife if you see her. And tell my son to call me—I’ve left messages all over hell for him. I remember the last words my Dad ever wrote me in a letter—“See you in my dreams.” How ’bout that.

Your on-going amigo,

Sam

 

From Two Prospectors. © 2013 by Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark; published by the University of Texas Press.



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2voqe6P
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more