Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2879

Carbons of eleven selected letters replying to answers to Heath’s advertisements in Saturday Review of Literature between 1938-1947. Enclosed with the originals are various draft wordings of his advertisements.

 

 

May 15, 1938

Adeline C. Appleton

Seven West 15 Street

New York, New York

Dear Madam:

I appreciate your letter May 30, by way of the SATURDAY REVIEW.

 Your activities in the aesthetic arts should predispose you to a special appreciation of the principles of social organization as being the foundation upon which alone any and all of the arts must arrive. It is of particular interest to me that all of the natural and practical sciences owe their origin to the aesthetic motivation which impels all original research into principles, as well as all creative arts in their objective forms.

 I am planning the formation of some select classes both in New York and in or near Baltimore where I have a country home. It will be very agreeable to me to arrange a conference with you. I am particularly impressed with the magnitude of your Alma Mater and the scope of her curriculum.

Please let me have, by phone or otherwise, your suggestions

for an appointment, preferably here at Butler Hall or at the Town Hall Club, 123 West 43 Street.

Very truly yours,

 

June 28, 1942

Dear Secretary — Eccentric’s Dream:

But are you the kind of dream that comes true? I wonder. But it might happen; so tell me a little more of it.

 Meantime and for your appraisement as to me:

 I have passed a few more milestones than the average but few of them, if any, on beaten paths.

 Yet my journeying has been far less then my seeking. That alone should qualify me as “an eccentric.”

 So what is my dream?

 It is to lighten the dark pall that rests on all the strength and loveliness the common life has so far gained with outlines of the path that led to them and with vis­ions crisp and clear of the fairer far and wider way that lies beyond. Not the yearnings of the heart for ends and goals would I arouse, not the poignant wish and hopeless dream but vision of the happy way to ideal ends, not of the what to be gained but of the practical how.

 For I am no mere dreamer of dreams. As a practical and practicing engineer I have made my career. The nat­ural sciences have been my only guide to visioned ends. I have sounded out the common bottom on which all the sciences rest and there I find the safe and solid ground from which to lift into endless new realities the social and the spiritual no less than the physical and material dreams of mankind.

 I have nearly completed a book; not a long one, but a book that describes the social organization in terms of its functions and growth and with regard to its ever present harmonies, however much repressed. It pictures the systems, the social systems of man as astronomy reveals the systems of the stars. Its approach is non-traditional and therefore at present acceptable to but few. Its ideas and point of view are as original and therefore as eccentric as were the conceptions of Newton and Galileo in the physical field — and they are precisely the same basic conceptions and objective method of describing processes and events, only carried over and forward into the fundamentally simple organization of the social world.

 I have leisure and a reasonable independence of means. I am social and sociable in disposition but almost devoid of capacity for initiating the new person­al and intellectual contacts that are indispensable for bringing new ideas to attention and serious consideration. This is due to an incurable and almost inconceivable negligence in opening and keeping up important correspondence. (Believe me, this letter is a distinct exception, not a habit.)

 I could use a collaborator.

Sincerely,

 

I am only temporarily in New York. My own and permanent home is in Maryland some ten miles out of Baltimore.

 

 

 

June 30, 1942

Dear Young School-marm:

Your invitation in character invites not only response but also applause. You must be one who loves and admires her profession; that gives me admiration for you.

 I doubt not with you it is not a trade of labor for pelf or wage but an art that creates and inspires — potentially the noblest of all the arts. All this you only vaguely feel. You pour out your powers not always spontaneously but in ways wooden and prescribed for you.

 Some, perhaps much, of the life and love you would give to your work is repressed and at times reproved. Still your fountain does not, as many do, run dry. It seeks a wider, perhaps a deeper flow. I hail you and commend your quest.

 But I am not really the ancient sage I seem. I, too, feel a gaiety that only half lives until it lives com­bined, a music that, divided,  only dreams and makes no chord.

 So I send this simple single note as my harmonic to the sound I sense in yours. Is there a melody singing somewhere in the silence waiting to be born?

Sincerely,

 

After July tenth address me at my home,

Roadsend Gardens, Elkridge, Maryland.

 

 

 

June 30, 1942

Dear Lady,

The good Emerson avers: “He that loveth maketh his own that he loves.” Hence your desire for “correspondence” suggests almost the certainty of you yourself, correspond­ing (in both senses of that word) with the “gentleman” who must possess some rather attractive qualifications to be worthy of correspondence with you.

 But how shall your present respondent be self-assured of his own correspondence with the pattern you have set? I can only say that had the SRL borne also from me an invitation to correspond its language and form would have corresponded very closely with that of your own.

 All of which, however clumsily expressed, means that I conceive both of us as having high ideals, broad conceptions of life, a humorous humor (even for the humorless) and quickening responses in nature and art to all that inspires.

 Our registry is the same; at our top-gallant-peaks the same colors fly, but what what are our ladings and whither do we bear? Can you remember the popularity of “Ships that Pass in the Night?” Or “The Coming of the Ship” in the best loved work of Kahlil Gibran?

 My home port is Roadsend Gardens, Elkridge, Maryland
(Suburban Baltimore), but I stay also in New York, where I am now, for a part of my time. Over-all length for me is 5-11, tonnage 160, keel laid long before yours (I wot) but of barnacles quite clean and timber (and timbre too) no less green.

 I can think of you neither as a dancing dory on the deep nor as a stately queen. Where do you fall between?

 

Wonderingly,

 

 

 

January 28, 1943

Dear “Young Woman”:

Well, I am “different”, possibly “genius” (some say), destined to (distant) recognition, vocabulary not prodigious but at least “superior”.

 I am ex-professional in engineering and law but my interests and tastes have been scientific, philosophic and finally esthetic. I regard all intellectual as well as artistic achievements and enjoyments and all fine creations as children of the realm of beauty, even the driest of sciences holding their votaries by their purely esthetic appeal.

 Yes, I have written, just completed, a book — unique, original. Readers laud it as epoch-making or give it the “dead pan;” no middle reaction. For some time I have indulged myself with the pleasure (and labor) of outlining a terse description of the social organization in precisely the same terms and by method identical with that of the true sciences in their analyses and descriptions of other than social phenomena. This becomes the foundation for a wholly new science, a veritable science of society, with all the technological potentialities that the existing natural sciences possess, besides vast psychological and spiritual (esthetic) implications. There is is much for discussion here, but to resume about myself — Though robust in thinking and in tastes I am still (shall I say) nostalgic, in the Platonic sense, for the excellent, the exquisite and rare, not to say ideal. I am perhaps a bit handicapped socially with a diffidence (often concealed) that survives a considerable amount of disillusionment; but I have an eager zest for sharing interests in things of the intellect and imagination and I love company in my enjoyments of the arts and finer recreations.

 My permanent home is in Maryland, rural-suburban, of ample
acreage and well favored by nature (and some art) for simple hospitalities, but I am free to journey or sojourn congenially abroad. Only recently I have come again to New York (where I spend a good part of my time), taken a sunny corner suite, pleasantly though a bit quaintly furnished, at the supplementary address I have written above where I expect to spend most of my time for the next several months. I am independent, unattached, sensitive to values and significances; spirit and mind well matured but not beyond a good weakness for intellectual gaiety in the right (or ripe) occasion.

 I love intellect in man or woman, but most of all when it yields precedence to fine sensibilities and feminine charm. Please tell me more of your interests, tastes, avocations, and I will be /sure?/ to write more interestingly (let us hope) next time.

Interestedly,

 

 

 

November 7, 1944

Dear Undisclosed:

Your notice of November fourth has a quality of simple earnestness and sincerity that bespeaks not only a fine and favored mind but more: — something not quite definable; something that suggests an idealism, practical and profound, reaching out towards some working arrangement in which the sense of forwarding the realization of a great ideal would be a large part, perhaps even the chief satisfac­tion and reward.

 Necessity, until recent years, has held me to occupation with things that are consumed and pass away, but yet, as means, should serve towards long enduring ends. The leisure I won I have put to good account. I have sought to discover, in the working sciences and their allied arts, just what is their key, the basic method by which, each in its limited degree, they have accomplished the prac­tical and widespread objectification of long cherished ideals: — not how to dream and aspire but how to build “the music and the dream” with certainty and power into the world about us and, above all, into the torn and tortured world of public and community affairs. In this I have had more success than I hoped. But for the publiciz­ing of such discovery I need (and sorely) the practical collabora­tion, not to say inspiration, of at least one other active and idealistic mind.

 In a business and professional way, I have been practical as well as ideal. My winged Pegasus (pardon the hyperbole) has achieved more than ordinary material success in at least one new field of business that all pedestrian minds regarded as only a crackpot’s dream.

 In each detail, and in all its implications, your notice appeals to me. May I hear from you?

Sincerely

 

 

 

December 10, 1945

Dear “Discerning Woman:”

I contemplate publication, shortly, of the following or similar advertisement:

LITERARY-EDITORIAL COLLABORATION WANTED to publicize   efficiently a momentous discovery: — A dormant social institution, potential to achieve world security and prosperity without legislation or any impairment of sovereignty. Autonomous, self sustaining, non-coer­cive; ever present, but hitherto unrecognized, hence under functioning. Project purely informational and public spirited; intellectual, non-hysterical.

 Your notice in the Saturday Review of Literature of December first strongly suggests to me that you would be interested.

 I shall look forward to hearing from you.

Very truly yours,

February 22, 1947

Dear Professional Woman:

I believe there is a theory (by some called a “Philosophy”) that all events and happenings pre-exist and have some kind of mystical existence in an infinite realm of the future and that all physical and material events are the particular consummations of a constant cosmic dream.. This engaging fancy may or may not be true, but such an adver­tisement as yours in the February first Saturday Review of Literature promotes the contemplation whether your placing it and my replying may not be among the slender threads of destiny that weave a pattern of some such kind.

 A well-timed retirement from active pursuits, scientific and professional, left me with an ample competence and leisure to turn my tal­ents as a research engineer into the field of social relationships and to discover there the basic simplicities by which all its seeming com­plexities are ruled. This has been exceedingly rewarding to my artis­tic as well as to my rational sensibilities. But in doing this I have been obliged to pursue a mode of thinking so eminently practical and conclusive that it has set me worlds apart from both the hopeful con­fusions and the blind defeatisms in which the current academic and polit­ical thinking is so deeply submerged.

 In addition, I find also a degree of social and emotional isolation which I feel an acquaintance such as yours might go far to relieve. And there are the excitations and relaxations of music and the arts and of simple social amenities in which, with a congenial co-participant, I might much more freely and more happily indulge. But more than all else is a need to communicate to others all the best that one has dis­covered and learned of the beauty with which all enduring things are informed and by which all things of worth and value endure.

 In this view, the problems of life and society are not to be met by remedies or resolved by reforms but rather to be transcended by en­lightenment as to the operation of their specific contrary procedures and the extension of these into the fields where problems and crises perennially prevail.

 If from all the above you’ve become convinced that I am an impractical idealist or a “stuffy intellectual” please let me change your mind. In my varied and not unprofitable business career I have succeeded, in a material sense at least, in just about everything I have attempted. My present great need and desire is to find at least one acquaintance and associate who cherished similar values and ideals and who might not only inspire but possibly collaborate in putting them into practical ef­fect.

 Please do not think I am terribly high-brow, in any technical sense at least, or anything of that kind — just a plain person with a humorous detachment and a whimsical fancy for doing worth-while things just for the fun of it. I ask of others nothing more than a fundamental sincerity and a seeking of wider horizons and a way to realizations of one’s own and the world’s undying dreams.

 I write from my address as given above in New York City where I have an apartment and receive most of my mail; but my permanent home is in Maryland where I have a country place near Baltimore and spend part of my time. For the last several weeks I have been visiting in Washington and the South and so not receiving any periodical mail. This accounts for my very great delay in responding to your most attractive invitation by way of the Saturday Review.

Sincerely yours,

Spencer Heath

Please use my New York address.

 

 

 

 

September 28, 1947

Dear Reformed Perfectionist,

There is now in New York, at the address given above, a research engineer, for some time retired from a successful career in the physical field, who is determined to publicize judicious­ly some corresponding factual discoveries that he has made in the wider field of public affairs — discoveries that, being made known, are, like physical discoveries, similarly demonstrable and self-evident, and thus assured of widespread non-political applica­tion — not by would-be Messiahs, but, as in the case of physical discoveries, by enterprising men of business and property and practical affairs.

 These discoveries are as practical to serve whole communities as efficient food-getting is to a man, yet they are consonant with and even fundamental to the realization of highest dreams and ideals.

 The man, though personally diffident, is intellectually of the highest confidence and clarity and of scholarly background. And he has also quite substantial (though modest) material resources that he wishes prudently to employ. He needs organiza­tion and collaboration.

 If you would like to talk or correspond with him, I am that man.

Sincerely,

Spencer Heath

 

 

 

September 28, 1947

Dear Unknown:

Traveling in Canada and the South, my SRLs did not follow me. Returning to New York; my eye falls thus belatedly upon your very attractive invitation to correspond.

Please let me greet you with a compliment on the choice of words in your self-portrayal, — as suggestive in selection as they are meager in detail. I would myself choose them, in the main, both for what I feel that I possess as my own and for what in others I know that I admire. I hope also that I may not be without claim to the attributes you desire your correspondent to possess, uncommon, in any very high degree, though they may be.

 I am a research engineer, now independent and retired. My chief interest is a happy engagement with the esthetic and creative, hence enduring aspects of the human department of the whole cosmic scene, — which is to say, more simply, that I am greatly interested in the spiritual aspect of things.

 My principal home is in Maryland where I have a place in the country near Baltimore, but I have also an apartment in New York where I spend much of my time.

 My outlook on life can be found, in part at least, from the items that I enclose. I would like to know much more of yours; I feel sure I will enjoy it a great deal.

Sincerely,

 

 

 

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