Quick! If you have thousands of dollars at the ready and want to purchase letters penned by Leonard Cohen to his long-time muse Marianne Ihlen, then Christie's has a deal for you. Until tomorrow, you may bid on and see and READ (with helpful transcriptions, even) seven letters written by Cohen to Ihlen from throughout their relationship. The Christie's site is really interactive and well-designed.
I cannot decide if I think this is cool or creepy. I think I lean towards creepy. I certainly hope that all the letters I wrote to my dearest don't get picked apart on an auction block when I am gone, not that I think anyone would care, really. This problem has been on my mind lately as I contemplate the fate of the Letter Writers Alliance archive. While I am in the process of looking for an institution to take on the grand amount of mail that I've been received of since 2011, I am cloudy on the ethics of it all. None of it will be useful in research without the permission of the author, for example. Getting those permissions is a full-time job, and may not be worth it. As much as I love how letters from the past help shape my understanding of those times, I also worry about privacy issues. I suppose the dead don't care, but that's the sticky wicket with my archive. We're all still here.
What do you think? And would you buy someone's love letters?
As a keeper of journals, and obviously a letter writer, I think about this sort of thing a lot. Personally, I hope that someone *does* pick up my things and perhaps finds something that speaks to them, and keeps them. I won't know, but I'm hoping.
Posted by: Terri Beth | June 14, 2019 at 10:23 AM