Even geniuses get the blues. “The more I write the less substance I see in my work,” Joseph Conrad moaned to a friend in a letter dated March 31, 1899. “It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.”
In the tightly structured, high-gloss prose of novels such as “Heart of Darkness” and “Lord Jim,” Conrad comes across as measured and detached and in perfect control — but in some of his letters, he’s a mess.
In his letters, that is, he’s a man. He’s not a slick and distant monument, which great authors — or well-known people of any ilk, from diplomats to athletes to soldiers to scientists to CEOs — can sometimes seem to be, when known only through their polished public faces.
The letters of the lauded thus provide the most primitive of consolations: Hey, even the magnificently accomplished can be petty, evasive, mean, small-minded, boring, stubborn, jealous and insecure, just like the rest of us.
But there’s a larger issue looming about letters, in this age in which written communication suddenly is the object of renewed scrutiny, thanks to e-mail and text messaging: Can letters be more than just dashed-off scraps of personality, more than codified gossip, more than just a print-based peep show into somebody else’s soul?
Do some letters constitute literature — fit to stand alongside gems from genres such as fiction, drama and poetry?
With the letters of the famous, it’s an easy affirmative. Few would quibble about the significance of “Rimbaud: Complete Works and Selected Letters,” scheduled for October release by the University Chicago Press, or just-published volumes such as “The Letters of Robert Lowell” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) or “Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt” (Columbia University Press).
But will the renaissance of the written word — as manifested in contemporary technologies — endow even communications between average people with a special resonance?
Andrew Carroll is a passionate advocate for the letters of the rest of us — for letters of all kinds, from all sorts of people, be they scrawled on paper or composed on keyboards.
“My Luddite friends are disappointed that I’m not more anti-e-mail,” said Carroll, editor of “Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters — and One Man’s Search to Find Them” (Scribner, 2005) and two previous best-selling collections of soldiers’ letters. “But there is a power in the writing,” no matter how it is transmitted, Carroll said from his Washington, D.C., office. “They’re genuine and candid.”
Letters are “the great undiscovered literature of our time,” said Carroll, who travels the world seeking letters that convey the raw, visceral experience of war and its consequences. “This is the unknown American autobiography.”
Yet Naomi Baron, the American University linguistics professor whose books include “Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading” (2000), is more skeptical.
“I used to quip, `Is anybody going to publish the collected e-mails of Horace Walpole?'” she said. “There’s been a lot of conversation in the last three or four years, especially with the rise of instant messaging, about the so-called renaissance in epistolarity. It simply means that more people are using their hands to create communication as opposed to their mouths.
“There’s a tacit belief that if you just keep people writing a lot, they’ll write something better,” she added. “We’re reinforcing the belief that anything a person writes is wonderful.”
But even if most of us aren’t Lowells or Rimbauds, can’t our letters be rich and interesting? “The good news is, there are a lot of people who care about their writing,” Baron conceded.
And letters, because they’re ostensibly intended to travel in a straight line from one person to another, can burn with earnest intimacy. That’s why reading someone else’s letters is such a gas: It seems like eavesdropping on a particularly juicy conversation at the next restaurant table.
Trick of the form
Still, the genre’s feel of unmediated authenticity often is an illusion, Baron said. “The letter — at least as it has developed in the modern West — is structurally a format that can be adapted to fit multiple purposes, not all of which are particularly personal in nature.”
Some letters, that is, are not spontaneous reflections; they are strategic calculations intended for wide dissemination, such as letters to the editor of a newspaper, or manifestos written in the form of letters, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s stirring “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Letters can sound nakedly personal and blazingly sincere, but sometimes that’s just a trick of the form.
Yet even if letters are written with an eye toward publication, the genre still possess a jittery immediacy — this is happening right now — and breezy informality that make them unique pieces of literature. In many cases, we can’t tell if the scribbler knew that future fame might make a communication ultimately public; but that doesn’t matter when assessing the letter. The power and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jan. 31, 1937, note to Gerald and Sara Murphy, just after he learned of the death of their two young sons, wouldn’t be diminished — even if we discovered that Fitzgerald envisioned the letter in a published collection, which is precisely where it ended up:
“Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort of joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.”
Thought-provoking
Contrived or not, there is something poignantly appealing about letters collections when a reader dips into them here and there, skipping whole decades and then backtracking fitfully, darting from a plangent confession of woe (buck up, Conrad!) to a sprightly description of some casual miracle of nature. “All the way along,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend on April 5, 1872, describing a fine morning walk, “I was thanking God that he had made me and the birds and everything just as they are and not otherwise; for although there was no sun, the air was so thrilled with robins and blackbirds that it made the heart tremble with joy . . . “
Letters can meander along for a while, sounding routine and even a little dull, and then suddenly shimmer with insight. “There is no job on earth that is not bad for the writer, including writing,” was James Agee’s arch observation to his spiritual mentor, Father James Flye, in a 1934 letter; the two had earlier discussed the downside of writers forced to teach writing. “There really is no answer or solution and for want of one must say, live as you can, understand all you can, write when, all, and what you can.” That tells you more about Agee — his rueful humor, his headlong devotion to his craft — than any dozen of his essays or poems.
Yet there also are times when reading letters feels like cheating, like a way of getting to the heart of a public figure without doing the hard work of plowing through a biography or volume of history. Letters are lazy shortcuts into a time, a place, a soul.
You don’t have to know much about physics to scarf down “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman” (Basic Books, 2005) and the heartbreaking missive he wrote to his dead wife: “I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me . . . I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You only are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead.”
Ideas matter, not status
We’ve been trained to think of letters collections as the exclusive domain of the celebrated. Who would care about the text messages of the obscure, about the thoughts and feelings of the faceless and nameless?
Anyone who reads letters such as this one from “Behind the Lines,” which includes missives from American soldiers and from America’s allies and enemies, as well as from civilians caught in the crossfire. The writer is a young boy sent to a Nazi death camp:
“My dear parents, if the sky were paper, and all the seas of the world an inkwell, I could not describe my suffering and all that I see around me.”
Letters, Carroll believes, carry a unique force and meaning. “There’s something about the intimacy of letters written solely for the person receiving them. You get the emotions, the perspective.”
You get the daily details and the abstract musings, a report about the weather in the sky and in the soul. You get the annoyance that can flair in longtime relationships and the soft consolations that can accompany that same familiarity. You get greetings and farewells. Quick asides and pompous aphorisms.
And you get the sly glints of wisdom, the fresh and lively observation that lifts the obscure woman into the ranks of great authors or yanks the renowned man temporarily right back down to earth.
“Happiness,” Stevenson mused in a letter to a friend in 1872, “is a matter of bottled stout and roast beef.” You can call him a great writer — but just don’t call him late for dinner.
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`A cold, sinister yellow wind’
The content of a letter can range from exalted to ordinary, from the day’s weather to literary wisdom, and the tone can be gentle or bellicose.
From “The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. Five, 1932-1935” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979):
[Aug. 21, 1932]Aha — the heat wave has broken and we are all cool again. This happened quite suddenly here — a cold, sinister yellow wind rushed through the garden about 2: as if a lid had been opened and air escaped from a cauldron.
From “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman” (Basic Books, 2005):
[Jan. 4, 1967]The fact that I beat a drum [Feyman played bongo drums] has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings — and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me. I am human enough to tell you to go to hell.
From “All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writing” (Scribner, 1999):
[1942; no day specified on letter. Bush was in military training in Chapel Hill, N.C.]Dear Mum and Dad: Today I felt better than I have since I’ve been here. It was hot but not unbearable. One fellow fainted at drill just to remind us that it was still hot. It is amazing how our moods change here. So many little things affect us. A cold Coke after drill can do more for one than you can imagine. I have never appreciated little things before. Ice cream, movies, a 15 minute rest, a letter . . .
From “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor” (Vintage, 1980):
[Nov. 17, 1956]You are right of course about not understanding the ordinary emotions any better than the extraordinary ones. But the writer doesn’t have to understand, only produce. And what makes him produce is not having the experience but contemplating the experience, and contemplating it don’t mean understanding it as much as understanding that he doesn’t understand it . . .
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jikeller@tribune.com
