Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Hand-Written Love Letters to Diego Rivera

“Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.”

Mexican painter and reconstructionist Frida Kahlo is among the most remarkable figures of contemporary culture. At a young age, she contracted polio, which left her right leg underdeveloped — an imperfection she’d later come to disguise with her famous colorful skirts. A decade later, as one of only thirty-five female students at Mexico’s prestigious Preparatoria school, she was in a serious traffic accident, which resulted in multiple body fractures and internal lesions inflicted by an iron rod that had pierced her stomach and uterus. It took her three months in full-body cast to recover and though she eventually willed her way to walking again, she spent the rest of her life battling frequent relapses of extreme pain and enduring frequent hospital visits, including more than thirty operations. As a way of occupying herself while bedridden, Kahlo made her first strides in painting — then went on to become one of the most influential painters in modern art.

Two years after the accident, in 1927, she met the painter Diego River, whose work she’d come to admire and who became her mentor. In 1929, despite the vocal protestations of Kahlo’s mother, Frida and Diego were wedded and one of art history’s most notoriously tumultuous marriages commenced. Both had multiple affairs, the most notable of which for bisexual Kahlo were with French singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker and Russian Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky. And yet her bond with Diego was one of transcendental passion and immense love.

Kahlo’s love letters to Rivera, found in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (public library) and stretching across the twenty-seven-years span of their relationship, bespeak the profound and abiding connection the two shared, brimming with the seething cauldron of emotion with which all fully inhabited love is filled: elation, anguish, devotion, desire, longing, joy. In their breathless intensity, they soar in the same stratosphere of love letters as those exchanged between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Diego.
Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.

F.

Diego:

Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

Auxochrome — Chromophore. Diego.

She who wears the color.
He who sees the color.
Since the year 1922.

Until always and forever. Now in 1944. After all the hours lived through. The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion. With no other wish than to go on until they meet. Slowly. With great unease, but with the certainty that all is guided by the “golden section.” There is cellular arrangement. There is movement. There is light. All centers are the same. Folly doesn’t exist. We are the same as we were and as we will be. Not counting on idiotic destiny.

My Diego:

Mirror of the night

Your eyes green swords inside my flesh. waves between our hands.

All of you in a space full of sounds — in the shade and in the light. You were called AUXOCHROME the one who captures color. I CHROMOPHORE — the one who gives color.

You are all the combinations of numbers. life. My wish is to understand lines form shades movement. You fulfill and I receive. Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.

Auxochrome — Chromophore

It was the thirst of many years restrained in our body. Chained words which we could not say except on the lips of dreams. Everything was surrounded by the green miracle of the landscape of your body. Upon your form, the lashes of the flowers responded to my touch, the murmur of streams. There was all manner of fruits in the juice of your lips, the blood of the pomegranate, the horizon of the mammee and the purified pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated all my blood through the tips of my fingers. Smell of oak essence, memories of walnut, green breath of ash tree. Horizon and landscapes = I traced them with a kiss. Oblivion of words will form the exact language for understanding the glances of our closed eyes. = You are here, intangible and you are all the universe which I shape into the space of my room. Your absence springs trembling in the ticking of the clock, in the pulse of light; you breathe through the mirror. From you to my hands, I caress your entire body, and I am with you for a minute and I am with myself for a moment. And my blood is the miracle which runs in the vessels of the air from my heart to yours.

The green miracle of the landscape of my body becomes in your the whole of nature. I fly through it to caress the rounded hills with my fingertips, my hands sink into the shadowy valleys in an urge to possess and I’m enveloped in the embrace of gentle branches, green and cool. I penetrate the sex of the whole earth, her heat chars me and my entire body is rubbed by the freshness of the tender leaves. Their dew is the sweat of an ever-new lover.

It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found what I saw it in your hands, in your month and in your breasts. I have the taste of almonds from your lips in my mouth. Our worlds have never gone outside. Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

Your presence floats for a moment or two as if wrapping my whole being in an anxious wait for the morning. I notice that I’m with you. At that instant still full of sensations, my hands are sunk in oranges, and my body feels surrounded by your arms.

For my Diego

the silent life giver of worlds, what is most important is the nonillusion. morning breaks, the friendly reds, the big blues, hands full of leaves, noisy birds, fingers in the hair, pigeons’ nests a rare understanding of human struggle simplicity of the senseless song the folly of the wind in my heart = don’t let them rhyme girl = sweet xocolatl [chocolate] of ancient Mexico, storm in the blood that comes in through the mouth — convulsion, omen, laughter and sheer teeth needles of pearl, for some gift on a seventh of July, I ask for it, I get it, I sing, sang, I’ll sing from now on our magic — love.

Pair The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait with more exquisite love letters by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Balzac, Rilke, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

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Willa Cather’s Only Surviving Letter to Her Partner, Edith Lewis

“I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures.”

Long before the age of data and hacking and involuntary transparency, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Willa Cather was a fierce custodian of her own privacy. Despite being a prolific letter-writer, she burned much of her correspondence and, in a will written during the final and rather dark years of her life, forbad the posthumous publication of the remainder. Now, more than sixty-five years after her death, her correspondence is at last revealed in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (public library). But even so, only a fraction of her letters survive, the vast majority a victim of Cather’s own privacy-obsessed hand — something editors Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout speculate was “an expression of a personality seeking to control all access to itself.” They make a note of Cather’s extreme compulsion for privacy:

In her maturity, Cather was a skillful self-marketer, and a major element of her marketing strategy was to limit her publicly available texts to those she had meticulously prepared.

Cather was most voracious in guarding — and, to a large degree, destroying — her the most personal of her letters. This is the only known surviving letter from Cather to her lifelong partner and literary executor, Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived for the last 39 years of her life. A poetic ode to the same cosmos that great minds from Ptolemy to Carl Sagan have admired, it may lack the passion of Virginia Woolf’s letter to Vita Sackville-West or the proud surrender of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s confessions to Edith Wynn Matthison or the longing of Eleanor Roosevelt’s missives to Lorena Hickok, but it bespeaks one of love’s greatest hallmarks: the shared wonderment at the magnificence of a universe two souls inhabit as one. For, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has famously put it, “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

Sunday 4:30 P.M.
[October 5, 1936]
Shattuck Inn, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

My Darling Edith;

I am sitting in your room, looking out on the woods you know so well. So far everything delights me. I am ashamed of my appetite for food, and as for sleep — I had forgotten that sleeping can be an active and very strong physical pleasure. It can! It has been for all of three nights. I wake up now and then, saturated with the pleasure of breathing clear mountain air (not cold, just chill air) of being up high with all the woods below me sleeping, too, in still white moonlight. It’s a grand feeling.

One hour from now, out of your window, I shall see a sight unparalleled — Jupiter and Venus both shining in the golden-rosy sky and both in the West; she not very far above the horizon, and he about mid-way between the zenith and the silvery lady planet. From 5:30 to 6:30 they are of a superb splendor — deepening in color every second, in a still-daylight-sky guiltless of other stars, the moon not up and the sun gone down behind Gap-mountain; those two alone in the whole vault of heaven. It lasts so about an hour (did last night). Then the Lady, so silvery still, slips down into the clear rose colored glow to be near the departed sun, and imperial Jupiter hangs there alone. He goes down about 8:30. Surely it reminds one of Dante’s “eternal wheels”. I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures. If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things — because we can wonder.

I have worn my white silk suit almost constantly with no white hat, which is very awkward. By next week it will probably be colder. Everything you packed carried wonderfully — not a wrinkle.

And now I must dress to receive the Planets, dear, as I won’t wish to take the time after they appear — and they will not wait for anybody.

Lovingly
W.

I don’t know when I have enjoyed Jupiter so much as this summer.

Edith Lewis, left, with Willa Cather in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, 1926

(Image: Special Collections, University of New Brunswick)

Of the choice to violate Cather’s insistence on privacy, the editors rationalize:

The concerns that we believe motivated her to assert her preference are no longer valid. Cather’s reputation is now as secure as artistic reputations can ever be, and her works will continue to speak for themselves. These lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage her reputation. Instead, we can see from our twenty-first-century perspective that her letters heighten our sense of her complex personality, provide insights into her methods and artistic choices as she worked, and reveal Cather herself to be a complicated, funny, brilliant, flinty, sensitive, sometimes confounding human being. Such an identity is far more satisfying — and more honest — than that of a “pure” artist, unmoved by commercial motivations, who devoted herself strictly to her creations and nothing else.

[…]

Cather is now a part of our cultural history. Her works belong to something greater than herself. It is time to let the letters speak for themselves.

And speak they do — vibrant, dimensional, full of the uncontrolled richness of human experience, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather join the ranks of history’s most wonderful letters.

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How Attractive Are You To The Opposite Sex? Esquire’s 1949 Questionnaire

“Almost any man can stand almost any amount of flattery.”

Somewhere between the time women stopped being chastised for wearing pants and riding bicycles and the time they began hacking their way to true love, women were building the atomic bomb in secret, but mainstream society had cut the ribbon on the era of the arm-candy babe. From Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts: A Time-Honored Guide to the Perfect Party (public library), originally published in 1949 and brimming with the era’s most flagrantly preposterous gender stereotypes, comes a set of questionnaires designed to help the ladies and bachelors make themselves more attractive to each other. And though at first glance the lists might appear to reveal the era’s appalling standards of good womanhood, encrusted with all kinds of superficial qualities and completely vacant of intellectual merit, they in fact reveal far more about the Esquire man and his own sensibilities in what he desires in a mate. (Also of note: The disparity in agreeableness of appearance between the male and female illustrations.)

1. Do you bring the names of other men into the conversation to give yourself a sought-after appearance?

   Don’t. This may give a man a sense of inferiority — he is uncomfortable with you, and soon drifts away to someone else. It may make him wonder how much talking you do about him.

2. Do you wear clothes that make you a little more up-to-the-minute than the other women in your set?

   Good — provided your taste is reliable and that the clothes suit you. Men may rant about the “crazy hat” but they swell with pride when their lady companions arouse admiring stares.

3. If you are asked to get another girl for a foursome, do you pick one obviously less attractive than you are?

   You are unwise to do so. Get the most glamorous girl you know, and both men will be pleased.

4. Do you make a point of building up other women, even those you dislike, in discussing them with a man?

   This is sound practice. But don’t put it on so think that it sounds like a line.

5. Do men marvel at your capacity for holding liquor?

   A great mistake: it gives you a fast reputation and runs into money — the man’s money — besides.

6. How many comfortable chairs are there in your living room?

   At least two, I hope. No man can fall in love unless he has a chance to relax and he can’t if either of you sits bolt upright.

7. Do you keep men interested by hinting that later — not tonight — you’ll be really demonstrative?

   This is a low trick and one that a surprising number of men see through at once. If you kiss a man, it should be for your own pleasure and not to reward him.

8. Do you make things easier for a man by suggesting that he climb into a car first, if he’s driving, or by asking him not to stand up when you come into the room?

   This is an error — men know that they are supposed to show these signs of consideration to a girl and they respect her more if she takes them as a matter of course.

9. Do you ever embarrass a man by telling him he’s good-looking or has big muscles or is too, too intelligent?

   Try it! Almost any man can stand almost any amount of flattery, however obvious, without embarrassment or surprise.

10. Do you knit when you are having a cozy, fireside evening with a man?

    For some reason, men hate to see a woman doing anything with her hands when talking to her. Undivided attention is best.

11. Do you either play bridge or dance really well?

    If not, take steps to correct this at once. You’re better off if you do both well, but one talent is mandatory.

12. Are you so beautifully groomed that you make an average man feel like a lout when he takes you out?

    Fine. Men are extremely critical of any imperfection in a girl’s neatness. If he feels like a lout once, the average escort will take pains to be better-dressed himself the next time.

13. Do you, when you have first met a really attractive man, clinch your future acquaintance by some polite variation of “Come up and see me sometime”?

    It often helps out on the occasions when the man is too shy to make the first advance himself.

14. Do you keep your friendships warm by chatty calls to your men friends at their offices?

    This is fatal.

15. Do you use artificial conversation gambits like “What movie would you choose if you had to see it every week for a year?” to start talk with a shy dinner partner?

    A very good plan — someone has to start the conversation and a question like this can keep it rolling for quite awhile.

16. Do you save yourself wear and tear by not troubling to entertain men bores?

    A grave mistake. Bores have their uses since a clever girl can practice her conversation on them, with nothing much to lose. Besides, they often have attractive friends.

17. Do you suffer from indecision when ordering dinner or drinks in a restaurant with a man?

    This maddens them — learn to make up your mind rapidly.

1. Do you use the continental approach, based on the belief that an immediate pass flatters a woman?

   This is the average man’s greatest mistake. If a pass, on first acquaintance, doesn’t insult a girl it at least bores her.

2. Do you show your real fondness for a girl by telling her about her bad points and advising her how to improve them?

   This is again an error. If you must tell her you hate her perfume or how she does her hair, wrap it up in heavy sugar coating.

3. Do you show your devotion to a woman by holding her hand or putting your arm around her when her friends are present?

   Please don’t. Even a girl who is affectionate in private dislikes public mauling.

4. Can you describe the dress or hat worn by the last two girls you took out?

   If not, notice and comment on the next few. Women appreciate having men notice the efforts they make over their appearance.

5. Do you have a double code about drunkenness for men and women when they are together?

   If a man has to get drunk, he’ll be more attractive if he restricts this behavior to stag company.

6. Do you sometimes take a girl out on parties of four or more, as a change from twosomes?

   A good idea. A girl may feel hurt if you never ask her to meet your other friends.

7. Do you make distinctions between the jokes you’d tell a man in the club and those you’d tell a girl in a park automobile?

   Almost no women like bathroom jokes or jokes with dirty words.

8. Do you tell a woman she’s beautiful, even if she isn’t?

   This habit hurts nobody and makes a lot of girls happier.

9. Do you ask an attractive girl — who is probably busy most evenings — to call you up sometime when she’s free?

   Don’t do this: you may always ask a popular girl far enough ahead of time to find a free evening.

10. Do you plan your evenings with a woman ahead of time or leave the choice of amusement up to her?

    It’s much more flattering for a man to announce the evening’s program, showing he has given thought to her amusement.

11. Do you believe it necessary in the modern age to push in a girl’s chair for her and to light her cigarettes?

    These small courtesies mean a lot to a girl.

12. Do you ever tell a girl you love her, under the spell of the moment, when you suspect that you won’t tomorrow?

    This is a dirty trick and if you do, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Moreover, the word will soon get around to other women.

13. How many times a week do you shave?

    Once a day is minimum, if you care what women think of you.

14. Would you dine a girl expensively and not buy her flowers, or economize on the place and bring her at least a gardenia?

    Most women would prefer having flowers and less to eat.

15. If your hostess at a dance is obviously having a whirl, do you consider it necessary to dance with her?

    You always should, as a matter of good manners.

16. Do you try to arouse a girl’s interest by boasting of your success with other women?

    Don’t ever do this!

17. Do you consider it a young girl’s own business whether she gets tight and is indiscreet when she’s out with you?

    Keep an inexperienced girl from getting tight, if you have to spank her, and don’t let any woman become indiscreet through liquor. Triumphs over drunken women don’t help any man.

18. If a girl you’re fond of asks you to be nice to her cousin with adenoids and buck teeth do you cut her off your list?

    Not pleasant, but if you rally around and give Cousin Belle a whirl, you’ll soon be known as the nicest man in town.

19. If you had a quarrel with a girl — in which she is clearly in the wrong — will you wait for her to apologize before calling her up or risk being a door mat and do it first?

    Be a door mat — it’s easier for you to call a girl than for her to call you.

The rest of Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts features a variety of recipes and party tips, from how to brew the perfect cup of coffee to how to estimate the ideal number of guests for your dinner party to how to finesse the art of dessert, with an invariable side of era-appropriate sexism so dated by today’s standards that it tips over from the appalling into the amusing. Complement it with this Victorian map of woman’s heart tipping the same balance.

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