by H. K. Bush
But it was impossible for me to say whether there was any affection from her. And behind it all was Sensei’s looming presence, not to mention Miyamoto’s slimy threats, if that’s what they were. Was a relationship with Mika even plausible, I wondered? What would Sensei think if I were to pursue his niece? I had no idea at that time, but soon enough I would find out.
Professor Goto’s reference to Jack’s interest in “epistolary friendships” certainly resonated deeply for me. In fact, it was precisely in this important chapter that I realized how my own work and influence, as provocateur of Jack’s literary scholarship, was a key reason he had been called to Japan in the first place. Indeed, while he was still an undergraduate, I had hired him as a research assistant, putting him to work in the Lilly Library transcribing the unpublished letters of T. S. Eliot. I also recognized that Jack’s preoccupation with letters was not merely academic. Our friendship over many years modeled precisely the sort of relations he studied.
It all commenced years after his adventures in Japan. Perhaps rather strangely, for much of his last decade we had carried on what I can only call an extraordinary and even intimate friendship via the United States Postal Service—we maintained an unspoken agreement that there would be none of this Internet nonsense, but instead we would send real letters in envelopes bearing American stamps, moistened by real human tongues. And so, over the years, we kept to our silent covenant.
Beyond our occasional letters, what we mostly shared was a passion for our work as literary historians and critics. My own work involves nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Early in my career, I wrote a book entitled The Gilded Neighborhood, about Nook Farm, the genteel village in Hartford where Mark Twain lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was published by a top university press, managed to become an oft-cited text, and forever after made my name recognizable in the field. But I was unable to follow it up with the all-important “second book,” instead pouring my energies into textual editing. Nowadays, I co-edit the journal American Realism, and I direct the ongoing efforts of the William Dean Howells Project here in Bloomington, a scholarly edition of the complete written works of an important American writer.
Despite its more mundane associations, the Howells Project is probably closest to my heart, and indeed is the main source of whatever trifling fame I’ve achieved in my admittedly quiet and rather routine career. We at the Project are the curators of one writer’s millions of words, the executors of a lifetime of careful scribbling. Often I feel a lot like a scribbler myself—slightly out of place in this age of wireless communications. I’m no Luddite, nor am I violently opposed to technology, but for old-timers like me, birthed into a different era prior to the Telstar satellite and its offshoots, wireless often translates, ironically, into disconnection. Lincoln spoke of the “mystic chords of memory” holding America together through the horror of a long Civil War, and one might be well justified to ponder what precisely connects us, in these latter days of miraculous “connectivity”? Despite all these innovations, here’s what I still consider to be a perfectly fine answer: it’s the words, words, words.
I recall that spring of 1997 when Jack reached out to me, announcing his new job at Gonzaga. Given the excruciating job market, it was great fortune he was able to locate such an attractive, permanent position at Gonzaga, a solid Jesuit university located in the desert places of eastern Washington, and where eventually he was rewarded with well deserved tenure.
It had been over a decade since we’d communicated, and after that initial silence, he slowly began cultivating a long-distance relationship with me, his former teacher and advisor. Since then we’d steadily traded postcards, sent each other books to read, even exchanged videos and CDs. With every gift, we included chatty, single-spaced letters, letters that grew longer as the years passed. They were highly nuanced, dense and jocular, the special kind of letter one receives from only a few friends over the course of a lifetime.
One package included a signed copy of his first book, Epistolary Friendships: The Power of Letters in American Authorship, 1870-1930, which was based on his dissertation work at Yale, and published by the University of California Press. I had helped him edit in its final stages, and was flattered to see a few of my own ideas more fully fleshed out and well expressed. I recall working on his book during a steamy Indiana summer, when I sat for many long, undistracted hours on my screened back porch, overhead fan slowly rotating, listening to the distant sweet corn growing, the patient emergence of gleaming tomatoes that would soon be slathered with Miracle Whip and sprinkled with salt. I was glad to do this service for an old student, one who was emerging as a serious voice in the field of American literary studies, just like those ripening tomatoes. And after a long day of intense and focused editing, I enjoyed a few ears of sweet corn and sliced tomatoes, always kept in the fridge, chilling next to a few longneck bottles of beer.
Epistolary Friendships was a book that told stories in pairs, mapping the way famous authors—Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton and Henry James, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound—carried on their friendships through the writing of letters. It can be rather astonishing to study the letter-writing habits of such monumental authors. On many days, Mark Twain scribbled out twenty or more letters, all by hand. So did Longfellow, Howells, James, and many other great writers— thousands of hand-written letters over several decades. Many of those letters are available in libraries and other archives today, but hundreds—even thousands—are still missing or in private hands. Many were burned by their owners, destroying the secrets they contained.
But every once in a while, an unknown cache of letters or an unknown manuscript will turn up in a basement, attic, or estate sale. Or at a fancy auction at Sotheby’s. Or even on the black market, with millionaires outbidding one another for the privilege of owning some unique item of literary lore: an unknown letter, a buried photograph, or a first edition with annotations by the famous author who owned it. There’s gold in those old papers, it seems—maybe even more so in our day of texting and social media, at least for those who have eyes to see it.
Jack’s book was published in the fall of 2001, almost precisely as airliners were crashing into skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. His fresh new volume, wrapped in its glistening dust jacket, arrived in my office just days before the tragedy. It sat on a corner of my desk for weeks, gathering dust, as all of us crowded around televisions, mesmerized by the spectacle of the shattered icon of American capitalism, the thousands of shattered lives, and clamoring for whatever new information might become available. The book and its subject matter seemed vaguely irrelevant in the aftermath of 9/11, as did a lot of other tedious features of academia. One of the most prescient images attached to 9/11 was the great cloud of paper fluttering everywhere in the breezy morning, like downy snowflakes. So a book about letter writing, about how words can hold us together, seemed rather quaint in the glow of images being replayed over and over on CNN.
Despite the sinister implications of those jetliners, my extended correspondence with Jack led to a deep and genuine affection. I looked forward to each exchange of letters and ideas—even as they became less frequent—and none more so than when his final package arrived last winter—plump, mysterious.
At first I believed it was simply the logical, final step of our own epistolary friendship. But I now know it was much more. Jack’s adventures in Japan originated, at least in part, in our relationship so many years before. It gives me some joy to say that what Professor Goto recognized in Jack’s work was, to whatever extent, also a recognition of my own minor contributions to the field. I say that with as little bravado as I can conjure. Obviously, when I first read Jack’s manuscript, I had no idea I would be drawn into the narrative as more than a minor character.
But now I know better: I’ve become just as implicated in this literary adventure as anyone. In effect, Jack’s story was destined to become wedded to my
own story and would change my life in ways I could never have foreseen. An uncanny result, one that Jack had perhaps planned all along.
CHAPTER 7
Soon enough, the meetings with Sensei took on a new urgency. One day, after I sat for a minute or two alone, Sensei swept into the room, holding a pile of books, a few folders, and two pairs of white gloves. It was the day he commenced revealing some of his previously mentioned “items.”
“Yu-san, I am sure you of all people might find these of interest.”
“Yes, Sensei?”
“Do you mind wearing these?” He handed me a pair of the thin, linen gloves, pure white, then called for Mika, and rattled off some incomprehensible Japanese instructions. Soon enough, she returned with one of those specially-made boxes used in many libraries for the storage of valuable documents, such as letters. Deftly, she placed it on the table in front of us and backed away again. We both put on the gloves, and Sensei hurriedly untied the strings holding it closed and pulled out the contents, stored neatly in file folders. The tops of the three folders read, “Twain-Twichell 1897-1900.”
“Do these look familiar, Yu-san?”
I inspected several of the leaves from the first folder. Months spent studying the handwriting of both Mark Twain and Joe Twichell prepared me for the examination, and I deduced the letters were written on paper from the correct era, and, by all appearances, looked to be authentic. I began scanning the one on top:
Hartford. Nov. 2, 1897
Dear old Mark,
We have been reading, and re-reading, and again reading your “In Memoriam” with the accompaniment of a gray autumn sky and the falling leaves to blend with its unspeakable heartbreaking sadness; its aching, choking pathos. It sets all chords of memory and of love a tremble. It plainly speaks of the pain of Life’s inscrutable mystery, the riddles of human experience.
I looked up at Sensei. “This letter is about the poem Twain wrote a year after his daughter Susy died. It was called “In Memoriam,” after Tennyson’s famous elegy,”
He nodded at me. I leafed through and found the next letter—they appeared to be ordered chronologically.
Vienna
Dec. 21, 1897
Dear Joe,
I was touched by your last letter—touched, I say, to the very bones. I hand it to you, old reliable Joe—your words are as a balm to this tired old heart. That pathos, as you put it—it is like a dream, or rather nightmare, and I cannot ever awaken. I languish in the study, grinding away on a shipwreck of a story about a town called Hadleyburg; or I sit in the parlor and listen to Clara playing piano; or, I wander out of doors, and look up and down the tired old city streets, but never finding the one I wish to find. Meanwhile, Livy moans in the next room, enervated and inconsolable. How do men outlive such days, Joe?
I glanced again at the date, and asked, “Sensei, are these what they appear to be?”
Professor Goto sipped his tea, then nodded. “I thought you would be a person who not only could recognize them, but would also appreciate such things, Yu-san. What do they appear to be?”
“Well, they look to be actual, autograph letters. The time is about a year after Twain’s daughter Susy died, and it is still obviously very much on his mind, and remains a topic affecting his writing. But I thought I had read all of the letters from this period, about Susy, and I don’t remember these. I could write down the dates and check a few of the standard sources to see if they are listed, if you like.”
I thought I detected a slight grin from Sensei, and once more he glanced to the side, then snapped a rice cracker in half, putting it in his mouth and chewing. He then leaned over, grabbed a tome off the stack he’d carried in, and handed it to me. It was the scholarly volume listing all of Twain’s known letters of the period, and I immediately began looking through it to see if the one just read was mentioned. After a moment of searching, he said, “That will not be necessary, Yu-san. Those letters are not listed in any of the standard guides.”
That was a shock, of course, since undiscovered and unlisted letters from such a major author are a rare commodity in literary circles these days. My eyes went from Sensei back down to the letters I held in my hand. I paged through a few more, and a deeper thrill ran through me as I realized that I might be one of the only people to know about them, besides their owner. Overall, there were about ten letters from Twain and ten more from Twichell, a total of about eighty pages of autograph, original, unknown letters. Possible values at auction might be as much as $25,000, or even much more (auctions often produce much larger sums than can be anticipated).
“Are all of these letters unknown, Sensei?”
“Unknown to the standard sources. But not unknown to me—and now, to you!” He smiled in my general direction, without meeting my eye.
“Then I would like your permission to study them.” He nodded, and I began reading through them. A mere ten minutes later, my heart pounding, I had to stop myself from jumping up and running around the room! I could swear I heard the blood rushing through the veins at my temple. It was obvious these letters contained new and intriguing information not available anywhere else. These moments of gleeful discovery are what veteran scholars live for. “Perhaps we should make these letters known, Sensei. Have you considered publishing these?”
“Yu-san, these letters must remain our little secret—for now. Also, any other items that I choose to present to you, today or in the future. I am showing you only because you have already proven to me that you are one of the world’s experts in these matters. One must have … trained eyes to comprehend the beauty of such items.”
He paused for effect; he had my full attention. “In fact, I brought you here for this very reason, as I mentioned. I have so few people in my world who understand such things. I am hoping you will not betray my trust.”
The comment about how he had brought me here caught my attention. Again, it sounded almost as if he had personally selected me for the fellowship. By this point in our emerging relationship, I realized this was plausible, but I had let that notion pass before. And I did again at that moment, focusing instead on the letters before me. “Can you tell me about how you got these?”
He thought this over. “I can tell you many things, Yu-san. But for now, I will assume you recognize I have remained quite interested in collecting, even to this day. Passionate, and some might even say—obsessed? In any case, I saw myself as a collector of lovely things, whatever I found valuable. Worthy things. Something that Walter Benjamin once said has stayed with me over the years: ‘to renew the old world is the collector’s deepest desire.’”
He saw me chuckle just slightly, I believe. “Yes, Yu-san. I proposed to renew something from our past. Is that really so quaint? Best of all, I had assets with which to do it. With assets, one can do many wonderful things in life, and I wished to use mine for the preservation of certain items.” He hesitated again. “Yu-san, do you remember the Utamaro print outside in the hallway? Do you know the history of the ukiyo-e prints in Japan?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Sensei. You’ve spoken of them before. I know they fell out of fashion for some time.”
He nodded. “Yes. But it’s even more disturbing than that. There was a time in our history when Japanese people became ashamed of those lovely pictures. They wished to become more ‘modern.’ Or what their intellectuals assured them it meant to be modern. And so they began to rid themselves of their past, and those items were sold off to foreigners. Many of the most beautiful wood block prints of Japan are no longer here because the Japanese people forgot how beautiful they are. This is a national disgrace. At least there were the wealthy Americans who saw their beauty and saved them. The Japanese lost their eye for them, but the outsider understood the beauty of the native art, once the natives had long forgotten.”
Mika entered, bringing us fresh tea and tiny chocolate biscuits. It seemed reckless, having these valuable Twain letters on a table with snacks and tea, but Sensei seemed unconcerned
. He began collecting the letters, putting them back into the box, then asked Mika to return the box to whatever room was its permanent home. I wanted to keep reading them, and Professor Goto sensed that, but simply said, “There will be more time for reading those later, Yu-san. And I have other things that you might like to see as well. For now, let us speak openly.”
I ate a wafer, sipped some tea. “Yes, Sensei?”
“Yu-san, may I ask you something? I am sure you might have noticed that the people at the university have some interest in your comings and goings, yes?”
His comment seemed a bit melodramatic, but later I better understood the microscope under which I had been living since my arrival. I believe he was concerned about my loyalty, and perhaps my discretion, which I felt capable of honoring, though I wasn’t ready to cut off a finger for him, or whatever. Still, I said, “Of course, Sensei. And please don’t worry; you have my loyalties.”
“Yu-san,” he said, “I would like to ask for your assistance in the future with a few small but very special items that have come into my possession over the years. I hope that you will allow me to learn from you about such things. I would like to think of you as … a collaborator, if you are willing.”
Even though his intentions remained unclear, I nodded, expecting him to continue. Instead, he was silent for a long minute. Then suddenly he spoke again. “I am sure you must have suspected all along that I have some little interest in your scholarly work. You have produced an interesting project with your dissertation. There are a few minor errors, of course, but on the whole I think it is worthy. I hope we can talk about that—next time, perhaps.”
The bit about the errors caught my attention. What errors? “You read my dissertation?”
“Yes, Yu-san, of course. Why should this surprise you? Obviously, with the help of our library staff, I can read almost anything I want, from anywhere in the world. It is a fine piece of work, and you should be very proud. Of course, any research is only partial, and must depend on what is available. In the future, I wish to talk about these matters. And perhaps I can even provide a little information about certain aspects of your research.”