Letters to the Editor

by Mo McDonald

It took me a couple of days to pluck up the courage to ring him and I recall planning the operation carefully, so as not to be overheard by my family. Robert was on nights at the hospital. Being a junior doctor and a shiftworker at our local hospital meant that I was alone and often lost myself in my books once the children were in bed. That evening, I placed the radio in the hall and turned the sound on so that my conversation would not be overheard.

  I felt calm as I waited for the call to be picked up at the other end, but it rang without any answer. I walked into the kitchen and finished tidying away the dinner things, allowing half an hour to pass before trying the number again. It rang and then a softly spoken man said, ‘Hello.’

  JACK

  I answered the telephone from the tower that I loved. I was writing and needed to be alone. The stimulation of London was great but solitude helped me to focus. I had been filming in Dublin most of the week, glad of the chance to stay in Ireland. Our home there was maintained for us by a delightful couple who lived in the grounds.

  Picking up the phone, I felt strangely nervous, even though I was not sure that it would be Marian.

  ‘Hallo,’ I answered.

  ‘Hallo, this is Marian Davies.’

  She sounded quietly confident.

  ‘Hallo, did you ring just now?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. It rang for a while with no answer. I thought you must be out. Then I tried again.’

  ‘I thought I heard it,’ I confessed.

  ‘Sorry to ring so late. When dialling your number, I realised that I was about to speak to a stranger. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is a bit,’ I agreed.

  ‘I just wanted to put things into perspective.’

  ‘Well, you’ve made a start and that is good.’

  ‘All my life I have tried to be sensible, but this time I thought I was going round the bend.’

  Marian sounded sincere as she said this. I felt actual concern for her, so I stressed, ‘You mustn’t do that. No, you mustn’t do that. I think you should tell your husband. What does he do?’

  She took a moment to answer. ‘He’s a doctor.’

  ‘Well then, he must be used to dealing with stranger things than this.’

  ‘No, he’s very sensitive, I know he would be hurt. This might help me.’

  She sounded like a young sister might do when confiding in an older brother. My heart warmed to her. Suddenly, I wanted to protect her. I asked, ‘What do you mean? If we meet?’

  ‘No, talking to you might help.’

  ‘Oh, I hoped that we might meet, just the once, in my office. See how you feel next week. If you fancy it, ring Hannah and see what she can arrange for you to pop in.’ I hoped that by saying this, I sounded encouraging.

  ‘All right, thank you. I’m sorry I got into a state.’ She sounded apologetic.

  ‘That’s alright,’ I said fondly. ‘It is as if a gear shifts and…’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed.

  ‘It’s happened to me once or twice in the past,’ I confessed.

  ‘Has it?’ she almost whispered.

  A silence fell between us. I spoke next. ‘It was nice meeting you and it is always very nice reading your letters, but it would be very difficult for us to meet on a regular basis. Your time must be very restricted because of your family and my time is because of my work.’

  I paused, and then went on, ‘Because of my work, it would be very difficult for us to meet.’

  ‘I know.’

  Another long pause, then she quietly added, ‘I had better go now.’

  I felt the moment as I said, ‘It has been nice talking to you.’

  She sadly replied, ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  I was surprised at my reaction to her call. I felt an emotion that I hadn’t felt for many years. I thought that my life as a successful writer, broadcaster and family man had been going okay. However, this childlike woman had made me realise that I was not satisfied with life as it was and that I had emotional needs as well as creative ones that were not fulfilled. Like her, I too needed to listen to my innermost feelings and recognise what my anima was telling me, in order to grow from my imagination.

  I turned to Carl Jung’s explanation, for about the hundredth time, that a man must pay attention to the woman within his psyche and a woman to the man within hers. It was even more important than ever that I remembered his teaching. I knew it almost word for word, like a chant; it was the mantra on which I was now basing my working life.

  The Jekyll and Hyde in me wanted to help her yet keep her childlike. I wanted her to be there for me, but I knew that I ought to encourage her for her own sake to develop and to grow, as an individual. I would try to teach her and to guide her to a higher degree of intellectual understanding, while at the same time developing even more of my creative side by using the muse that she had become. I was not only Jekyll and Hyde; I was a Mary Shelley, with a kind of female Frankenstein in the making.

  Jung says not to allow one’s self to be dependent on any one woman; he warns the following…

  ‘The tendencies of the anima can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman. It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is ‘she.’ In this situation a man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time: he falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are of ‘fairy-like’ character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature that is fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.’

  I had to constantly work hard to remember this advice. I wanted to be a good man but my character was against it. I reaffirmed my decision to use Marian as a muse. I had always found it very easy to fall in love – romantic love was what I was drawn to. To have the devotion of Marian was a gift from heaven. The platonic communication was very real between us, but I knew that I must keep it in my artistic life and not let it intrude into my private world, where my family dwelt. To meet Marian just once and to take in the details of her face would be very pleasing; it was already fading in my memory.

  I was unable to sleep after hearing her voice; it sounded so gentle, so innocent and my memory returned to that moment, when I had opened the door of the viewing booth at the studio, the moment when our eyes first locked into each other and I felt the need in me very strongly. The need to love and to be loved, not as a flesh and blood being, but as a spiritual soul with an unearthly desire that was more than the lust of human experience. It was almost a religious feeling of longing and Marian was like a spirit that I longed to be real. I had enjoyed a bottle of wine before bed but I knew that it was not the alcohol that was making me feel that way. It was an ache beyond human emotion; it was a longing for a love that would save me from myself because myself believed in a higher spiritual love and sacrifice. My heart felt heavy with it that night, as I tossed and turned, calling her name as if part of a prayer.

  I returned to the office the following Monday expecting to hear from Marian and to find that she wanted to make a date to meet me again. It was with a sinking feeling that I read the letter waiting for me on top of the pile of correspondence on my desk.

  Dear Jack,

  Thank you for saying that I may see you, but talking to you made me realise that if I came it wouldn’t be to get things into perspective. It would be because I want to see you. I must pull myself out of this state of mind and face the fact that I am only flattering your ego and hurting myself.

  Bye,

  Marian.

  PS How can I just forget when you visit my home on the TV, in newspapers, on the radio and you also sit in my bookcase? How can I forget? M

  I was u
nable to manipulate my interviewees to reply on air to her sad letter because the first few programmes in the series had gone out and I had already edited and recorded the rest.

  Dear Marian,

  Please don’t upset yourself so much. I do suggest that you tell your husband. I’m sure that he would understand and probably laugh you out of it in no time. Meanwhile, please be assured of my best wishes and hopes that you will be fit and well as soon as possible.

  On a different subject, I am sure that with your Irish background, like me, you are relieved that Thomas McMahon has been sentenced to life in prison for the assassination of Lord Mountbatten. Justice has been done.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jack K

  The intense nature of our relationship seemed like an electric force through the air, unsaid thoughts being the vital flux between us. Our letters crossed, proving this to be ever so.

  Dear Jack,

  Please let me write my way out of my self-pity. I have listened to your last two interviews and both the writers were right, I do find myself in your books. It must have made a huge difference reading them one after another over several months. Perhaps I use you the way that women in America use their psychiatrists. I want and I need something that is just for me so as not to be just a life-support machine, much as I love my family. Can it be wrong to cling to you with my mind, if I can cope? Please let me reach out for you from time to time.

  Love to you,

  Marian (your pen pal)

  P.S .You know what they say about women drivers, a gear may slip from time to time!

  My reply was immediate.

  Dear Marian,

  Thanks for your letter. I think ‘writing your way out of it’ seems a very good idea. Good luck to you.

  Yours sincerely,

  & best wishes,

  Jack

  It had been the decent man in me that had suggested that she get help to end her confusion, by reaching out to her husband, but I was very aware that doing so would have had the effect of a power cut. The invisible signal pulsing through the airwaves would have had no receptor to receive it. Thankfully, she gave me what I wanted; I was delighted. However, I admitted to myself, I had hoped for a meeting so as to see her once again. I knew that we would have been reserved, holding back and not saying anything out of place; that was the type of people Marian and I were. Or the type of people that we had been brought up to be, fighting to hold in the passion of the imagination and the struggle of the world within. It would have been painful, most probably, to see each other for an hour or two in a sterile office and only make small talk. I would have adopted the air of the teacher, mentioning only forthcoming programmes, and she would have smiled politely, listening attentively. Or she might have broken down as the repentant schoolgirl when facing the head of year, feeling confused and guilty for letting both herself and her family down (as she would see it) and for wasting my time (as she would see it).

  I could only imagine what might have been, but even imagining was pleasing to me and I had her out there, waiting for me to cast yet more spells on her unsuspecting mind. I was in a state of love and I enjoyed it; it made me hurt, as it stroked my pain, and that was what I needed so as to know I was alive. The pain and the sorrow of love meant more to me than the joy, as expressed by the poets. I wanted to feel that I bled from the scar of love; the metaphor of an arrow piercing the heart was so accurate to me. I wanted to bleed and I hoped that Marian did too.

  MARIAN

  As far as my everyday life was concerned, I was my usual self; it was only when alone and my husband was working evenings or weekends that I went into the Jack Kelly zone. Somehow I was able to departmentalise my two worlds and I did have two very different personas at that time, which I switched on and off according to the circumstances. I must have seemed stable because Robert being a doctor never questioned my state of mind or that I appeared different in any way. He knew that I admired Jack Kelly and that I had a correspondence with him, but he could have had no idea of the conditioning (grooming, as it would now be called) that was going on and that my mind was changing both by myself and by an outside influence.

  Of course, I believe in free will and that most people know the difference between right and wrong, so I was not completely innocent, but I was very much the undeveloped mind in the hands of the great intellectual, and although he couldn’t force me to hang on his every word, he knew precisely what he was doing and that I was plugged into him. He was the current and he only had to press the right button to switch me on. It puzzled me as to how I had the attention of such a prominent personality, a household name and a celebrity. It puzzled me and, I have to say, it delighted me, especially as I had no idea what was really going on. I admit that it did give me a thrill, switching on the television set whenever his programme was on air. I felt a great connection, and being allowed to correspond with him gave me a sense of freedom. In fact, it was a bondage, which made me far from free.

  I didn’t feel unfaithful to my husband because I felt as long as I was just a fan writing to her chosen idol, it was okay. The fact that I got carried away in the toing and the froing made me a stupid, lovesick woman and I came to regret that. It never occurred to me that he was getting something out of the relationship until I took it upon myself to explore the shelves in the library and discovered Jung and Freud. Even then, at first, I was only reading them from my own point of view; I had no idea that he was practising what they were preaching. I thought that I was a victim of my own silliness, not a victim of his power.

  As you can imagine, I have had time to think long and hard about my part in the dramatic bonding between us and I have wondered whether it might have had something to do with my childhood. When I think back to the days, and they were very happy days, at a convent school where I was taught the passion of Christ and the devotion to the saints, I feel that it embedded a certain yearning in me. I was in a very spiritual world of love and sorrow. I was used to looking up to Our Lord, who I loved and longed for and felt the need to reach out to and to love. Being married was wonderful but the love for my husband was in the real world. I had experienced the sorrow of Jesus who died on the cross and the tender love I felt that he had for me in doing so. I needed that spiritual love – it was very different from the madness of first being ‘in love’, when the mind is swamped by the heart and the flesh is weak in its longing.

  I wonder if the love of Jesus was the love that I was trying to rekindle in reaching out to Jack. I missed the atmosphere of the closeted convent life that was so colourful, so beautiful, so spiritual and so apart from the real world. The story of Jesus with all his pain and his sorrow filled me with a spiritual need, some of which I lost once the Vatican modernised and did away with the Latin and a lot of the mystique of the Catholic service. I had been engulfed by it all and maybe I turned to Jack Kelly and his world of art as a spiritual supplement to my life. I am not meaning to be blasphemous or sacrilegious; my religion remains with me as an important part of my life, but I really do think that I was looking for that wonderful place within, where love of an invisible being is romantic and admiration of something that is higher than one’s self is fulfilled.

  Writing to Jack was almost like a prayer for me, and his gentle encouragement like the forgiving priest who wants the best for the child. His work was taking me to another level where my intellect could grow and feed. I was weak in my devotion to Jack and I enjoyed the pain of worshipping from afar. If I had remained a follower without questioning, I would have been like the martyred saints of old, dying for my faith; instead, I spoke up to my leader and offended him. His plan was to cast me aside and move on to the next convert as he left me by the wayside feeling shame and guilt. I challenged him because I could feel myself drowning in the tide of his arrogance. I fought to understand the meaning and I held out against the current of his abusive power.

  Also, it was a time in society wh
en I was living the life that I had been conditioned for and one that was changing rapidly for women. I was not involved in the women’s movement, being too busy raising a family to pay much attention to it all. However, I was aware of the world around me and I must have been influenced by the fact that the political world and the change to more outspoken popular culture was in conflict. Maybe somewhere in my comfortable bubble I felt that I had the right to speak to the outside world from within the security of my home, as long as I was not actually beyond its confines. I never wanted to burn my bra or to become a man-hater. My experience of men was very limited but very special. Both my father and my husband respected women and were generous with their love.

  The fight of the ordinary man and woman in the street, through the power of the limited televised news, was infectious without one even knowing it. My own family life enlightened me with a shock that my children were growing up in a very different world from the one that I was trying to impose upon them and they were being encouraged to question everything and everybody. Even the question of good and evil became unfashionable, and as for hell it was banished from thought. I had been taught that we are made in the image of God and that the Devil is sitting on our shoulder trying hard to tempt us at every possible moment. After my experience with Jack, I started questioning that. I started to believe that most of us are born in the image of the Devil and it is God who has to fight with all of his might to save us from ourselves. I did, I did feel that.

  JACK

  The season had opened early in November with a talk about writers and in particular North American writers and how they perceived the American dream. The nightmare of failure and the pursuit of success were top of the list, both in the written word and on the screen. I edited the talk to conclude with me asking why some people turned to writers and fiction in their everyday lives and was it a desire to find a solution to life or even to escape from it? I pressed my guests to agree that it was often the case that those who turned to books usually had a problem; they were looking for something or didn’t want to hurt somebody. Or it was easier not to change things.