Jennifer Dunbar Dorn’s letter to Lucia Berlin from the Resort Boulderado, September 2, 1977. Courtesy of Jennifer Dunbar Dorn and the Lucia Berlin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College.
In 1977, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn wrote to her greatest pal, Lucia Berlin, from the Resort Boulderado, the place she was staying whereas she appeared for a home in Boulder, Colorado. Her “massive nook room” turned “a dormitory at night time,” whereas “through the day we roll the beds into a cabinet within the corridor.” She described the lodge as a “pale purple brick run by submit hippies,” a spot for folks on the make and on the transfer. This won’t look like a lodge that will have had its personal stationery, however it did. The paper’s crest incorporates a lantern and mountains, and the header reads HOTEL BOULDERADO in French Clarendon font: the typeface of Westerns and outlaws, of greed, playing, and journey. The lodge’s identify, Dunbar Dorn not too long ago identified to me, “is a mixture of Boulder and Colorado, clearly, however the mythic El Dorado is ingrained in every single place within the West”—its misplaced metropolis of gold.
I discovered this letter at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the place a group of Berlin’s papers are saved in a single cardboard field. Nearly all the pieces she saved over the course of her peripatetic life is compressed into this tiny area: correspondence, notebooks, evaluations, manuscripts, purposes for tenure. I’m Berlin’s first biographer, and I typically felt deeply moved as I labored via the field final summer time. Berlin is my El Dorado, and I had been on the lookout for her for therefore lengthy … Although the archivists on the library had despatched me scans of a few of these paperwork through the pandemic, it wasn’t the identical as touching pages she had as soon as touched.
As I examined the yellowed paper, inserting my very own thumb over the smudged thumbprint on the prime, I imagined Berlin studying Dunbar Dorn’s letter at her kitchen desk in Oakland after a shift on the Merritt Hospital switchboard. Principally, it’s about Dunbar Dorn’s journey from California to Colorado together with her husband, Ed Dorn, and their kids. Her emphasis is on their time on the highway, not on their arrival—on transience over stasis and on quest over complacency, core values of the counterculture to which she, Dorn, Berlin, and their dispersed neighborhood of writers and artists loosely belonged.
A postcard from the Resort Acapulco, from the fifties.
The Boulderado letter stood out to me due to the paper on which it was written. I obtained to Harvard within the third week of a analysis journey in pursuit of Berlin’s scattered correspondence, and alongside the best way I’d grow to be obsessive about lodge stationery. The attraction, at first, was aesthetic: lodge paper is fairly, and from the 40s to the seventies, it was ubiquitous throughout the States and Europe. A couple of days earlier, whereas wading via the papers of Berlin’s literary agent, Henry Volkening, on the New York Public Library, I’d seen that a lot of his purchasers wrote to him from inns. Berlin herself first used her creator identify on a lodge postcard to Volkening in 1961. She had simply eloped to Acapulco together with her third husband, Buddy Berlin, and she or he described her newfound happiness, signing off: “Lucia Berlin.”
However most of the lodge letters I sought out had nothing to do with Berlin’s work. By my third or fourth archive—in my third or fourth American metropolis—I used to be skipping lunch breaks to name up containers belonging to writers who I knew traveled steadily: James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin, Raymond Chandler. Right here is a few of what I discovered.
Raymond Chandler’s letter to Neil Morgan from the Resort Grosvenor, June 5, 1956. © The Property of Raymond Chandler. Courtesy of the Property, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
Raymond Chandler wrote to his pal Neil Morgan on Resort Grosvenor paper in 1956, describing a current bout of “psychological, bodily and emotional exhaustion” that he handled by “ingesting sufficient whiskey to maintain me on my ft.” At a second look, the handle on Fifth Avenue is underlined by a second one, of Room H363 on the personal pavilion of New York Hospital (“However don’t write right here”). Chandler wasn’t on the Grosvenor anymore; he was on the hospital, recovering from a breakdown. The lodge stationery was a decent entrance for a person who had been institutionalized however who nonetheless needed the individuals who liked him to know the place he was. “Don’t give me up,” he ends the letter to Morgan. “I would like associates.”
Kenneth Koch’s letter to James Schuyler from the Resort Claridge, from the late fifties. Courtesy of the Kenneth Koch Property and the James Schuyler Papers, Particular Collections and Archives, College of California, San Diego.
The Resort Claridge
Within the late fifties, Kenneth Koch despatched James Schuyler a letter on paper from the Resort Claridge in Paris, a Champs-Élysées establishment and a rendezvous for “touristes fortunés,” Koch wonders whether or not “worry of writing to somebody all the time in motion” is what has saved Schuyler from conserving in contact. He continues with a riff on the New Testomony: “Rise and observe me, Immity Skimmity, and by no means extra will you need your correspondent to take a seat nonetheless.” Because it was for Berlin and the Dorns, a selected sort of transience was, for Koch, a advantage. He traveled to flee the system, to not be coddled in upholstered rooms like the posh suites on the Claridge. There may be an asterisk subsequent to the lodge crest: “Simply kidding,” he provides, “see actual handle above.” This, it seems, is 41, rue du Cherche-Midi, within the then hip and nonconformist sixth arrondissement, which, because the battle, had grow to be the headquarters of existentialism and bebop jazz. He should have swiped the Resort Claridge stationery; his correspondence wears it as a fancy dress to play a visible trick on Schuyler—to “child.”
Gary Snyder’s letter to Shandel Parks from Timberline Lodge, July 30, 1954. Courtesy of Gary Snyder and the Gary Snyder Papers, Particular Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
Timberline Lodge
Resort stationery leaves loads of area for editorializing. Gary Snyder wrote to Shandel Parks in 1954 from Timberline Lodge within the Oregon mountains. The lodge’s identify and description seem on the header, and on the backside of the web page there may be an illustration of a ski carry, with tiny letters studying YEAR ’ROUND PLAYGROUND IN MT. HOOD NATIONAL FOREST.
Snyder explains to Parks that he has been wandering “disconsolately about,” from “the ocean seashores to the Mountains, from there to Seattle, and thence to Mountains close to Canada, and again to Mountains in central Washington, and once more to Seattle, after which to a stretch of seashore in central Washington, questioning, all the time, ‘Whence?’ and ‘Whither?’” Lastly, he “came upon a job” at Timberline Lodge, “attending to the «chair carry».” He didn’t plan to remain lengthy. The double chevrons round “chair carry” are a unique form from the opposite citation marks in his textual content, as if the language of chairlifts just isn’t his personal. At Timberline Lodge, Snyder was immersed in an unfamiliar, all-American world of commercialized leisure, one he mocks along with his infantilizing caption. He saved its chairlifts operating, whereas sustaining the detachment that pervades his letter to Parks. He makes clear that as quickly because the lumber strike within the Pacific Northwest is settled, he “will go to a sure crude logging camp” and “work till the snow flies. i.e. December, accumulating hoards of cash.”
Again to the Boulderado
By the point Dunbar Dorn wrote to Berlin within the late seventies, the Resort Boulderado’s stationery was knowledgeable by a countercultural aesthetic that was starting to enter the mainstream. The whimsical emblem and typography recommend that the lodge catered to seekers, dissenters, and outlaws—or to individuals who noticed themselves as such. Friends included William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Ishmael Reed, plus a rotating solid of audio system on the College of Colorado and the Naropa Institute. In his 1975 track “Come Again to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard,” John Prine describes a hippie “shopping for quaaludes on the telephone … Within the Resort Boulderado / on the darkish finish of the corridor.”
And but the lodge remained, basically, a enterprise. Within the eighties, after scraping collectively funds to renovate, it shed its dissident aesthetic and reverted to the plush equipment and costs with which it had opened in 1908. Right now, rooms begin at 2 hundred {dollars} an evening, and the “happenings” marketed on the lodge web site embrace a month-to-month “wine membership” beginning at forty {dollars} per individual. Burroughs and rollaway beds are a distant reminiscence.
After I referred to as the Boulderado to ask in the event that they nonetheless print their very own stationery, the front-office supervisor informed me that they did, however that she used it for official correspondence and welcome letters to friends. Branded paper is now not positioned within the rooms. And this brings one thing dwelling: irrespective of how intently I observe Berlin, I can by no means actually enter her world, as a result of it’s gone, together with the golden age of lodge stationery. What endures, in fact, is Berlin’s work. In her brief story “Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” initially printed beneath the title “The Legacy” in 1982, a dentist reveals his granddaughter a set of false enamel. “He had modified just one tooth,” Berlin writes, “one in entrance that he had put a gold cap on. That’s what made it a murals.” I feel, for her, this was a metaphor for the inventive course of. She does one thing comparable together with her fiction, drawing on her expertise and remodeling it, too, as Lydia Davis has noticed. And her interventions, improvements, additions, and omissions catch the sunshine: they’re the treasures, like El Dorado, or the gold cap on a tooth.
A prewritten lodge letter from the Mission Inn, March 14, 1946.
Nina Ellis is a British American author and scholar. Her brief tales and essays have appeared in Granta, The Idaho Assessment, The London Journal, the Oxford Assessment of Books, and elsewhere. She received an Editors’ Selection Award within the 2021 Raymond Carver Brief Story Contest. On the lookout for Lucia: A Biography will likely be printed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025.
