To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  On 19 March 2013, Bonhams held another solid sale. This time there were letters from Lewis Carroll, Henry James and Marcel Proust, and a postcard from Sigmund Freud. But by far the most interesting item was a collection of letters from a writer that no one at the auction had heard of. James Lindsay Steven, progressively gunner, corporal and sergeant of 1st Troop, 1st Brigade of the Bengal Horse Artillery stationed at Peshawar and Umballa, wrote more than 20 letters home to his brother and mother in Edinburgh between 1852 and 1855. Described in the catalogue as a remarkably vivid and ‘at times Kiplingesque’ account of the life of a British soldier on the north-west frontier in the years before the Mutiny, the letters work a different sort of charm to the others in the sale (and most sales), more valuable for their content than for their signature.

  Writing left-handed: Horatio Nelson.

  One letter, sent from Peshawar on 27 June 1852, captures the spirit of the rest: the easy manner and barrack-room prejudices may be attributed to the frank relationship Steven enjoyed with the letter’s recipient, his brother, while its florid and boastful imagery foreshadowed The Playboy of the Western World.

  An elopement took place the other day which astonished the whole lines. The bride belonged to parents in the 53rd Regiment, and had been the cause of great anxiety to a great many Sergeants and Corporals, all getting encouragement from her parents . . . One of our Troopers went down to see this far-famed wench (an ugly squinting-eyed thing), . . . when he told me he was determined to marry her . . . I spoke to the girl and proposed for her to make an elopement. The two got married, and I had a splendid night of it, they tell me I swore eternal love to a widow who had buried her sixth husband and she accepted me, putting a splendid gold ring on my hand. The day was fixed, and the old woman of sixty, with her hair as grey as a rat, actually thought I was going to marry her.

  I was thunder struck, and when I assured her it was all gammon, and never had the least intention of anything of the sort, she got into a horrible passion, calling me everything that was uppermost, swearing she would take my life at the first opportunity . . . I had to run for my life. I was laughing over it when I got to the barracks, when I happened to look out at the door, when there was my poor woman, along with a file of the guard going to the guard-room . . . As I happened to pass her I asked her how she was getting on, and put my finger to my nose. She made one bounce at me, but I was too wide awake, I sprang to a side, and she fell all her length on her face, smashed her smeller that the claret run out and send two of her teeth . . . down her throat. I had for to run again for my life, for she got up and got to a heap of stones, and began peppering me as hard as she was able.

  J.L. Steven was killed, aged 27, during the retaking of Delhi in September 1857. His letters – unimportant in the broad scheme of things, but a zestful personal addition to official accounts – were accompanied in the Bonhams sale by the author’s Indian Mutiny medal and his baptism certificate, from which we learn that his father was James Steven, a bookseller from Hope Park End by The Meadows in Edinburgh. The estimate for the lot was £1,000–£1,500, but it sold for £6,875.

  Thunder struck in Peshawar: a British soldier writes home.

  But how was a potential buyer encouraged to buy these wares? The letters were described in the Bonham’s catalogue by a man called Felix Pryor, a former manuscript specialist at Sotheby’s who then set up as a freelance expert and anthologiser. ‘Those India letters – terribly unusual,’ he says. ‘I had to restrain myself from making the entry four times as long.’ And how does one value such a thing? ‘My estimates are usually low. That’s always been my thing. If you say £1,000 to £1,500 and it makes £1,800 then everybody’s happy. But if you say £3,000–£4,000 and it makes £2,800 it’s just all a bit flat. I basically price things according to what I’d want if I owned it myself and wasn’t too pressed for money.’

  We meet at the Academy Club, a stubbornly shabby members’ bar in Soho, established (originally on a different site) by Auberon Waugh. ‘I think the idea was that it would be mainly for journalists and authors,’ Pryor says. ‘Poets were discouraged.’ He has photocopies of items he’s been researching at the London Library, a letter from Felix Mendelssohn from 1944 (‘He mentions a rehearsal, by which he means a concert’), and one from Victor Hugo, which brings back the story of the shortest letters ever written. Away from Paris and concerned about the success of Les Misérables in the early 1860s, Hugo wrote to his publisher with a single ‘?’. His publisher, delighted with sales, replied ‘!’.

  ‘Letters like these are a finite resource,’ Pryor acknowledges, ‘and we’ll never see their like again. The idea of collecting books leaves me completely cold. But letters and manuscripts, yes – you’re connected.’ Our conversation drifts to Sylvia Plath. ‘I had her papers in my flat,’ Pryor says. ‘Well, all the Ariel poems. I was cataloguing them – they sold to Smith College, from Ted [Hughes] via Sotheby’s. And I had her typewriter, a portable Corona. I had an American girlfriend at the time and she was deeply impressed that I typed letters to her on it. I imagine now that people are analysing Sylvia’s typewriter ribbon and going “Hmmm . . . Dear Sal? And who’s this Felix character?” ’

  He also had letters from Hughes. ‘Occasionally I open a book and one falls out. I know I do this for a living, but the thought of [personally] selling something that someone’s written? I’d rather starve.’

  Pryor compiles the catalogue entries for three Bonhams sales a year, and he is both delighted and saddened at the items people bring into the saleroom. The most disappointing items are usually those that have already been framed or appear in what he calls ‘shirt bags’, those cellophane-fronted sleeves that bear the mark of a dealer’s tired stock. ‘What you want are fresh discoveries,’ he says, discoveries after deaths or discoveries in attics. ‘We recently got one from the Front in 1914 about the Christmas truce, and it does actually talk about playing football.’

  He says that that his work, requiring a large amount of rooting around the Dictionary of National Biography and increasingly the Internet, benefits from a broad approach – the advantages of a generalist over a specialist. ‘I was recently in a court case, a forgery case where lots of Churchill had been faked, and the defence said, “Well Mr Pryor, what would you say if a Churchill specialist declared these to be true?” And I couldn’t actually say – because it would have been rather rude – “Well they’re the people most likely to get it wrong because they can’t see the wood for the trees.” But it’s a general writing person who will spot the fakes.’ Are there a lot of fake letters out there? ‘A few. Almost all Raphael letters are faked. And in the nineteenth century they were mad about [Oliver] Goldsmith – a lot of those were fakes.’

  In 1988 Pryor edited The Faber Book of Letters, a refreshingly concise collection (284 pages) containing much that is good, alarming and funny about the world. The range spreads from the Elizabethans to the Cold War, taking in Lord Byron, Abraham Lincoln, Captain Scott and Scott Fitzgerald.

  The collection was compiled very much according to personal taste, and held fast to the promise Pryor made to himself that the letters should not be dull. He regrets that it is principally the letters of the famous that survive, and that among history’s greatest casualties are the letters of ordinary people, who survive on paper only in legal documents. Some famous people, of course, are only famous because of their letters – Madame de Sévigné and Lord Chesterfield are in this band, and there are others who reputations are immeasurably enhanced by their correspondence, among them Keats and Henry James. But some of the gems in Pryor’s collection come from less well-known figures, among them Anthony Henley, MP for Southampton, owner of the estates of Northington and Swarraton in Hampshire (now the home of the Grange Opera and the grand Severals House), described by an acquaintance as ‘a man noted for his impudence and immorality but a good estate and a beau’. Writing to his constituents in 1734 in respo
nse to the failed introduction of the Excise Bill in Sir Robert Walpole’s government the previous year, Henley launched the sort of rant one would struggle to find in the files of today’s more timid MPs.*

  Gentlemen,

  I have received yours and am surprised by your insolence in troubling me about the Excise. You know what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to Somebody Else; and I know what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

  Alas, the letter may have been a dare, a literary esprit de l’escalier. Henley did write it, but he may not have sent it. He did, however, send a disappointingly sober response more in keeping with parliamentary diplomacy.

  Pryor told me that a few of his selections were determined by the lottery of copyright permissions. Pryor wanted to include a letter from T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), but had a choice to make. ‘There was a critically important one about blowing up Arabs and their trains,’ he told me, ‘and then one about staying at a hotel in Bridlington with the sea coming up and down like a Lyons swiss roll. We got a letter back [from the copyright holder – his brother was still alive at the time] saying, “terribly sorry, you can’t use the one about the Arabs, but the swiss roll one is fine”. I went “hooray!” – that was the one I really wanted.

  ‘I wanted to end with Einstein and the bomb, going out with a bang as it were.* And the University of Jerusalem, which owns the copyright, said we could do it if they got a cut of the royalties if the book sells. I said, “get stuffed” and they were quite nice – they said, “all right then, a copy of the book will do”.’

  ‘The nice little electrostatic machines’: Einstein writes to his old friend Paul Habicht in 1936.

  In his introduction, Pryor notes that there were more letters being written at the end of the 1980s than at any other time in history, and that reports of letter-writing’s demise were greatly exaggerated. But he also observes that letter-writing was not universally regarded as the elevated form we may imagine it to have been, either for the sender or the receiver. When the Jacobean playwright John Webster described a character on stage being presented with some plot-churning letter, his immediate impression is one of gloom: he assumes it may be a complaint, or a bill, or a claim from a woman that he is the father of her child. Even before brown envelopes, in other words, letters were often considered doomy news, best avoided.

  Taken as a whole, what can we learn from these excitingly random collections of letters at auction houses and the slightly more ordered gatherings in anthologies? We learn that we are not alone, and that letters may leave us both larger and other than we were. These are odd nuggets of unexpected history – history in the present tense, history from its participants. They expose a grand truth, and often the same truth we may feel when we read Shakespeare and Austen: no matter how original we consider ourselves to be, it is evident that our emotions, motives and desires have echoes in the past. We’re not so special; someone else has almost certainly been there first.

  Let Us Mention Marriage

  14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING, 1 COY.,

  9 AIR FORMATION SIGNALS, M.E.F.

  18th April 1944

  Dear Bessie,

  I don’t know what you will mainly feel at the conclusion of this letter, but I do want to remove the impression I have too pulverisingly included in earlier letters. I cannot withdraw my earlier warnings of instability, and I do not. But I want now to catch you up and carry lovely you to a place where you will forget I was ever so grim, and where you will only think of our possible lives together. Do not worry about ‘tomorrow’. You will make your own tomorrow, and I hope it will be with me.

  The second thing I want to say is that our association in the future depends on your ability to put up with me and my defects, not my ability to put up with yours. And that if we are spending much of our time regarding the other as a bed mate that is a very natural thing, since we are likely to be in that position before too long; I hope it doesn’t mean we are very lustful, but if it does, it doesn’t stop me wanting to tell you how I stiffen and ooze as I read your words and imagine you writing them. I shall do all that I can to keep you warm. I hope that we shall always love each other as we do now. Our thoughts are identical. Yes, we are in harmony! I am glad that I am your lover, and you are glad that you are mine.

  What a pity we cannot be together, so that I can do what you want me to do; perhaps I should say ‘try to do’. I am your servant and your master at once. I will command you and be commanded by you. Your breasts are mine. Whatever I have is yours. I want to have you. I want to awaken you as you have never been awakened. I yearn for your secrets. I want to tell you that you are my dear love, to keep me by you, to see I do not stray. I am not very collected when I think of you, your invitation and your loveliness – I am ‘shattered’ too, I do assure you.

  I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU.

  I do not feel very happy at the thought of the practical difficulties in the way of setting up house after the war. Every shark in the commercial world will be up and about. Unfortunately I used to donate most of my money to various good causes and I did not start to save until the end of the war in Spain. I think I had about £75 when our own war started; I did not increase this until I joined the Army. At the end of last year I had (my Mother told me) a mere (for my purpose) £227. I think that I am adding to this at about £2.10 a week. I do not know what will be required. Incidentally, I think that engagement rings are jewellers’ rackets, and that marriage is more properly transacted at an office than mumbo-jumbo’d at a church. I am sorry you don’t already know my views on this. You will have to be told sometime.

  Can you see that it is gradually dawning on me that you are too good to be missed? Will you tell me that we may be together really one day, and you will hit me if I start wanting to go? Remember now, that you have a hand in shaping me and making me, and that I want you to speak up where and when you like.

  I am strictly limited in the number of things I may send you. I can only send one Green Envelope weekly, officially, and I shouldn’t send any ordinary censored-in-unit mail. I am also rather limited in what I can say because, although it comes under the ‘private and family matters’ mentioned on the certificate, some of the things I want to say I cannot bring myself to write, as there is another censor outside the unit, liable to breach my envelope.

  Now enters logic, sobriety, order, so that I may mention some of the things that have happened lately around here. First, our Sergeant Major has left for England after six years abroad. (We shall be 35 if I wait that long.) There was no chance of making a gift, and we may not give money, so I asked one of the chaps who is good at printing to draw up a testimonial which we could all sign. But this chap alternates between drinking and sleeping, and let me down so that I had to write it out with my own miserable calligraphy. I was sleeping when it was presented to him, but he later came round the tents to say Goodbye. He doesn’t drink, but left the price of a bottle of beer for everyone to drink his health in. He is the best boss I have met in the Army. I am very apprehensive about his successor.

  When I am writing you I seem to be nearer you. I want to think of you and nothing else. I want to underline a dozen times that I need you and love you. I want you to the exclusion of everything else. I want to surround you and enfold you. My comments may seem hackneyed but you must know that you control me, and that I am filled with thoughts of you, and cry out for you imperatively and urgently. I want to touch your person and possess you. I don’t know how long I shall carry on writing things like this, but I shall not stop thinking of you as my partner, as my lover, my wife. The wonderful thing is that neither of us are saying anything that has not occurred to the other. You are nec
essary to me, whatever I may blithely have thought previously. How I long for YOU! I love you. I love you. I love you. Hurry on the day when I may say these things to you, with all the force I have and be received by your flesh and revived by your loveliness. How near we are despite the distance, how far from contact because of it, Bessie; love, mistress, wife.

  No, I am not fooling. I am as serious as yourself. Certainly let us mention marriage. Consider me as the one you will be with always from this day, if you want me and will chance it. I read a life of Donne in a Times Lit. Supp., and gained the impression he was no saint. Gladly and gloriously I would rove, I would grope, I would seek you. My dear and lovely, please believe that we are aroused together, and I am alert to your provocative delight. I know now that in 1946 or 47 we shall still be going strong. I hope, too, that by then we shall have each gazed full upon the other and admitted as we wish, our mutual love, dependence and obligation. By then your banks will have burst and I shall be with you in the flesh. I don’t want ‘marriage’ to ‘stagger in and out of these pages’. I want you to regard me as your future husband, to think of me, at least as your companion, at most as your everything. I want you to build on me in the assurance that we are each other’s, not that my contribution to our future happiness is less than yours. Try hard to have faith in me, though I be but a man. Tell me you believe in me and our lives together. Tell me that you think of US as a fact and not just a possibility, and that your intelligence guides your thoughts. If you are there, I shall not ‘scurry off’. If you are there I shall be with you, to comfort and to soothe, and to be comforted and soothed. Do not hope any longer for a permanent place in my heart; be glad (if you will flatter me) you have it. You are my love.