"Life through and through, the depths and the surfaces, all is profound..." - Typed Letter Signed

A very interesting and important typed letter signed from the innovative and influential American composer, a response to a letter from a young woman reacting to one of his lectures. December 9, 1955. 1 p. Writing to teenager Anita Oliver Bullard (later the wife of literary critic Frank Kermode), Cage responds in typically abstruse fashion to her questions: "Much that I said has no particular meaning, having been arrived at by means of chance operations. Its meaning is therefor [sic] general, moving out in all directions rather than just linear-logical ones..." Full text below. With the original transmissal envelope, postmarked December 12, 1955. Folding creases and toning; overall fine. 8.5 x 11 inches (21.6 x 28 cm).

Together with 2 typed and handwritten drafts of letters to Cage, one from Bullard and one from her friend Ruth Jenkins. Bullard and Jenkins worked together to create the two exaggeratedly different letters, one admiring and one scathing. Bullard writes (November 24, 1955; 2 pp.) that "Your words impressed me deeply, for they gave utterance to ideas which have been stirring in my subconscious for years, seeking some sort of coherent expression..." and asks him to clarify certain statements: "I must confess my inability to grasp the implications of these sentences [...] I will not say 'they are nonsense' simply because I don't understand them. But I would like to know what they mean." Jenkins' letter (n.d.; 2 pp.), meanwhile, takes the offensive against Cage's ideas: "...I am unconvinced that your theory of music is anything more than chaos in a professor's robe. [...] Bartok I understand and I admire Brubeck even though it is Bach that I like. I see nothing in this theory of yours. Please tell me how you can take something (music) away and put nothing in its place."

Text of Cage's letter, in full: 
"Dear Miss Bullard: Than you for your kind letter of November 24. I have just returned from the West Coast, and, it happens, that a Mrs. Carol Ely Harper (Office of Concerts and Lectures, University of Washington, Seattle 5, Washington) has arranged to publish my lecture in a magazine with which she is connected, Experiment. 
Much that I said has no particular meaning, having been arrived at by means of chance operations. Its meaning is therefor [sic] general, moving out in all directions rather than just linear-logical ones. That you responded is more important than anything I said.

'Every something is an echo of nothing." This is a way of saying 'Earth has no escape from Heaven.' Or a way of saying 'Eternal Life' or 'Nirvana is Samsara.'
By saying that the sounds are to be themselves in all of their acoustical details, I simply meant that as we go along we may eventually hear sounds as they are rather than as we think they are.
It is only by hanging on to the past that we think there is such a thing as repetition. If we move along, everything else does too. As Rene Char has said: Everything is virgin, even a repetition.
I myself believe that suddenly listening is profound, but European thinking has made it seem that only thought things are profound. It seems to me that life through and through, the depths and the surfaces, all is profound,—if it is profundity we are speaking of.

Actually spoken words are noises, and I was only making a few of them. They may be forgotten without any loss.
Very sincerely yours, John Cage."

Anita Kermode recalls the exchange of letters: "My best friend Ruthie & I were friends with a very old woman (in her 50s, perhaps) who taught piano and also played piano for dance classes etc at UCLA. One day she was fuming and scoffing about an imposter who’d given a concert at UCLA. He played on something called a ‘prepared piano’. He subjected his audience to long periods of silence.He spouted nonsense. He was a terrible fraud. She recalled some of the ridiculous things he’d said. The end result was that I & my naughty friend Ruth each wrote a letter to Mr Cage, sending it via the Musicians Union. We pretended to be students at the university who had attended his lecture/concert (though we were high school juniors at the time). Ruthie’s letter was sarcastic & scathing. Mine was awestruck and sincerely confused. We collaborated on composing these letters. But in truth, they did represent our rather different personalities. Mr Cage replied to mine, but not to Ruthie’s. I was in fact very moved by his reply, and felt that I had been an idiot, and that he probably had great depths of wisdom & creativity. Many years later, in 1969, I was living with Frank K[ermode] at Wesleyan University when they were both fellows, for a year, of the think-tank there. I got to know the real John Cage, a bit. He had me playing ‘Zen chess’ with him. He collected mushrooms and cooked them and offered them to the secretaries. I told him about the hoax my friend & I had tried on him when we were in high school, egged on by this wild wicked old piano teacher. I told him I’d felt bad about it ever since, because of his sweet reply to my phony letter. He thought it was all very funny."

Anita Kermode and Frank Kermode were the editors of The Oxford Book of Letters, a comprehensive anthology of letters in English from the 6th to the 20th century. (16292)

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