To the Letter
Page 29
god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness, the fullness . . .
Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on. A scene in a movie, a voice, a phrase was not for them volcanic. I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.
. . . Do you think we are happy together because we feel we are ‘getting somewhere’, whereas you had the feeling that with June you were being led into more and more obscurity, mystery, entanglements? And suppose the ‘getting somewhere feeling’ meant simply reaching a clarity, a knowledge, the very opposite of Dostoevsky – and that the clarity I have I may throw away, discard, repudiate entirely . . . You see, I often return to this conflict – the passion for truth, and also the passion for darkness.
But the desperate needs (and the sexual intimacy that followed) inevitably cooled. Five years after their coup de foudre Nin was able to write to Miller of his ‘twisted, ingrown, negative love’, of a pain no longer exquisite. ‘I want to try and explain to you, Henry, how it is you make things so inhuman and unreal that after a while I feel myself drifting away from you, seeking reality and warmth somewhere,’ she wrote from Paris in March 1937.
You repeat over and over again that you need nobody, that you feel fine alone, that you enjoy yourself better without me, that you are independent and self-sufficient. You not only keep saying it regardless of the effect on me, but you never once make a gesture or a sign like a human being . . . Everything in you pushed me away, your collective life, your constant life with others, your incapacity to create nearness or relationship with a person, always with a crowd. I seek, on the contrary, to keep you at the centre of my life . . .
The need of expression . . . one can put a finger on and say: there it is, it’s a heart beating; if I move, this person feels it; if I leave, this person knows it; if I drop away [this person] feels fear. I exist in him, there is something happening there. But when I walk into your place I see the most expressionless face . . .
I glanced over what you were writing in Capricorn, and there it was, the great anonymous, depersonalized fucking world. Instead of investing each woman with a different face, you take pleasure in reducing all woman to an aperture, to a biological sameness . . .
With you and me, I don’t understand, because there was no reason for our relationship to be tragic. None, as far as I am concerned. But it has become so for me because you do nothing to make it real. All you do evaporates, dissolves, decomposes it. You volatilize.
Remarkably, perhaps, after these two extremes, what remained between Miller and Nin was something lasting. It was a deep literary groove. He commented on the naivety of her early writing but was a great supporter of what she had shown him of her explicit diaries; her criticisms of his most famous novels were commonly shared by other readers, particularly women. What makes their correspondence compelling is not just their passion, but the fact that there is nothing else. For more than 40 years, and for hundreds of thousands of words, there is no talk of the mundane. There aren’t really any pleasantries either, and politeness is supplanted by directness. It is as if we are always arriving at an action film 30 minutes in, with everything hot and explosive from the start.
Their public notoriety increased with each publication and each ban or each court case, and they struggled creatively until the end of their lives (they each remarried, Miller several times). They saw each other occasionally over their 45-year friendship, and yet they were bound throughout by their struggle in writing and by their letters. And it is their letters – showing their writing and personal lives intermingled – that stands as their truest and strongest legacy. In the early 1950s, Anaïs Nin writes with tenderness again, and tries to sum up their friendship: ‘probably if I had the sense of humour I have today and if you had then the qualities you have today, nothing would have broken.’ And in another letter from the same period: ‘I have a feeling we are all going back to Paris ultimately, where we were happiest.’
As is the pattern, most of the Miller-Nin letters were published only after their deaths (Nin’s in 1977, Miller’s in 1980).* Nin and Miller both lived long and full lives: their reputations were secure, as was their notoriety. When the letters emerged, the philandering, self-delusion and destructiveness of their earliest correspondence couldn’t cause any more damage than their published writing had already done. Indeed, the reverse turned out to be true: their letters revealed fuller and richer selves, and a half-chance at least of understanding wholly complicated lives.
Days Become Weeks
27 WOOLACOMBE RD, LONDON SE3
21st January 1945
Dearest,
I am hanging on to the old old theory that no news is good news. The papers and wireless say that the exchange of prisoners of war has commenced, am hoping that this affects you, gosh I hope so badly. Churchill said in his speech that prisoners would be coming home and that the truth would come out, just supposing this also affects you. Oh Dear! Is that too much to hope to come home, to see you after all this worry, if it only could be true? I hope you aren’t hurt or ill, that you have been warm and at least [had] enough to eat, feel sure you haven’t been overfed, for they haven’t enough for themselves.
Oh Darling, perhaps it won’t be too long before I hear, I wonder how long the exchange will take, they do fiddle so, over these sort of things. What thoughts have you been having during all this long time? About Greece, I mean, I would so like to know, for it is such a muddle, politicians lie so glibly about such important things; doesn’t make post war years look very hopeful.
Just another missive, Christopher Darling – Keep Safe. I Love You.
Bessie.
27 WOOLACOMBE RD, LONDON SE3
26 January 1945
Dearest,
I have studied all the newspapers, but there isn’t any reference to prisoners in Greece. Surely there will be something in the press when prisoners are exchanged, a few small exchanges have been made, but nothing about the 600 prisoners that the RAF have been dropping supplies to. Unless I have missed something in a corner – don’t think so.
Where oh where are you Christopher my Darling, days have become weeks and still no news. I can’t settle down to read, not even in the train, so I am knitting up into vests the spurned coupon-free cotton-cum-wool instead of writing loving letters to you, am I bottled up –
I Love You.
Bessie.
14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING
SIGNAL SECTION, G COY., AIR FORMATION
SIGNALS, CMF.
24 January 1945
[Following a telegram informing Bessie he was safe.]
My dear Bessie,
Technically this is my second day of Freedom though I have only just got off the truck which has carried Bert and myself through the cold Greek mountains over tracks that once were roads, and now, with the thaw, are becoming quagmires. The most satisfactory journey of my life. Now, the warm hands of the British Army are about us and we are as comfortable as possible.
The great worry of my non-arriving letters probably cannot be effaced from your ‘system’. I must have added many grey hairs to those you have already. But now you can stop worrying, and get drunk tonight with easy conscience. (I have happily gulped two rum issues since I was released.)
Will write you very fully later. Use the usual address, and be sure I shall write as often as I am able.
Our future moves are a matter of conjecture. Most of the optimists think we will be coming home. If you think we should there is nothing to stop you writing to the Prime Minister, suggesting our return to allay relatives’ anxiety. Verb sap.*
Forgive this note. I hope you are well and undisturbed by aerial terrors.
I love you.
Chris
1st February 1945
My Darling,
This is so wonderful. Oh Gosh! Christopher, I have just received your telegram – how can I tell you how beautiful the world is, contact again with you, contact with life – Oh Darling of my heart. I did not realise what a benumbed state I had been reduced to, it took about a quarter of an hour to sink in, I did not whoop or prance but my knees went weak, my tummy turned over, since when I have been grinning happily to myself with a beautiful inward pleasure. FREE, FIT and WELL, such wonderful words, the relief from these last weeks of possible sickness, you Blessed Darling, I just haven’t any words, no words Christopher, just all bubbles and tremblings. I had been cheering up because as there was no news, felt you just must be a prisoner, but you know how your mind keeps worrying away in circles at all sorts of awful possibilities, well that’s what mine had been doing, and now Golly – how I love you!
Ouch. I want to hug you to bits, eat you, come to my arms you bundle of charms. Hurry up mail, I want to hear your voice again, hear you, loving me, wanting me as always. I have not been able to look at your photos or read your letters, much too painful, but I have now, I have now – you know you have been with me in all these bad days, I used to talk to you, inside myself, and I always made you answer that you were alright, and I used to hope that it was the right answer. Am I a silly dope? But I have a few more white hairs. You are there, you are alive. You are in this world with me, we are together, we, we, we, US. Deep breath here!
Dearie me, things are looking up, though this business of Germany fighting to the last ditch sounds rather appalling. Some silly blighter, an MP too, was asking for indiscriminate bombing of Germany, I should have thought what was happening now was grim enough to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty. I really can’t understand how Russia has managed to do this, what about supplies etc, surely she can’t go on much farther, good luck to her if she can, but what a performance?
I feel in that excited state that anything can happen any moment, something is in the air, with all this news from everywhere. I really should say that it’s me that is in the air, bounce, bounce, bounce. I am going to the pictures with Iris tomorrow, golly, I shall have to treat her. It’s so wonderful, you are wonderful, the world is wonderful, everything is wonderful. Please come home, home, home. Please do, Darling. Such dreams of our being – Oh My Love.
I Love You.
Bessie.
Chapter Fourteen
The Modern Master
Is it possible to write the perfect letter? Is it possible to even consider writing such a thing?
In the 1970s at Bedales, a vaguely alternative public school in Hampshire where a lot of famous parents sent their children, the school secretary would gather the morning post, walk past the classrooms, cross the orchard and enter the quad of the main building, and at the far side by the kitchens there would be a wooden tray with sorting slots arranged alphabetically. At 10.55 – mid-morning break – pupils would get drinks and a snack and look for mail, which, if they were lucky that day, they would take to their dorm room or the library to read.
Towards the end of the summer term in 1975, Frieda Hughes, 15, went to the far end of the quad to pick up a letter from Devon.
Dear Frieda,
How did the exams go? Did you manage to get into a nice fluent gallop with your answers?
The rain came just as we were finishing loading the bales – we had a wild rush to get them in, bales into the landrover, bales into Jean and Ian’s van, bales into the horsebox, bales into our ears, bales into the backs of our necks, bales in our boots, bales down our shirts. So we tottered home towering & trembling & tilting & toppling & teetering. And there in front of us was some other tractor creeping along with a trailer loaded twice as high as ours, like a skyscraper. All over the countryside there were desperate tractors crawling home under impossible last loads in the very green rain.
The rain is making everything grow again. Including your alpine strawberries, which are luscious – the ones the birds don’t get. Since we mowed that jungle of weed over the tennis court and the upper part of the orchard, there seem to be whole flocks of blackbirds and thrushes hunting there. And the doves. And Ginger-dandelion. He’s discovered a great metropolis of mice up there, that were beyond him before. He’s a fine mobile ginger flower.
It’s still raining, Thursday evening.
. . . Well, here we are, all aches and stretched joints, like broken down five bar gates, after our baling.
And here are all the holidaymakers, sitting in their sauna-bath cars under the downpour, staring at the sea, with their transistors turned up, & their ice-cream running down to their elbows, like cars stuck in a car washer. See you very soon.
love, Daddy
Ted Hughes wrote about the baling again in his poem ‘Last Load’ in Moortown, but the verse may seem less necessary to us now, now that we have the letter. It is not the perfect letter, and it probably wouldn’t rank in the top 100 letters that Ted Hughes wrote in his lifetime, but it is still a very fine one. It is lovely to read now, almost 40 years on, the sender dead, the cat no longer finding mice, and the recipient a middle-aged painter, because it is funny, observant, personal, vivid and warm. It is also, of course, high-school poetic: his letters were making hay.
There is alliteration and exaggeration and people doing animal-like things while animals go hunting, and the whole letter has the rhythm of a pecking bird, coming back to a point for effect. Sometimes the words are perfect and clear (the luscious strawberries), and sometimes they are perfect and arresting (the very green rain).
‘Very literary swaggering’: Ted Hughes in 1960.
But the letter works so well because it conjures up so many images on a single sheet. The hay baling is hot, rushed, scratchy and slightly obsessional all over Devon; the land is lushly and soakily productive; those who work it are honestly worn; that five-bar gate is still creaky and stiff; the poor tourists are trapped in steamed-up cars – the whole day summed up swiftly in a dutiful hand and then shared as a gift, and in so doing capturing both a personal picture and a documentary record. (No one listens to ‘transistors’ any more.) How attractive did Hughes find this life? He claimed elsewhere that Devon was a respite from the real world in London, but also, when he escaped to Yorkshire, that it was too deadening for good work. It probably didn’t seem too appealing to a teenager at the dawn of punk.
The letter forms part of an invaluable literary archive at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. But the main question is: could this letter have been written as an email? I don’t think so. It’s too thoughtfully composed, too layered and laden. It’s not self-conscious; it’s just a proper piece of work, homey and chatty and naturally lyrical, and I think as an email it would have appeared too writerly, too out of step with the technology that created it. If it had been an email, would Frieda have cherished and kept it? If it had been an email, would we have ever found out about it? And should we have done?
Ted Hughes never sent email. He never used a computer either. He distrusted these things, even though, by the time he died in 1998, the potential for sending one-click messages from a screen had existed for almost a decade. He was one of the last great writers to reject the new medium as something superfluous to his needs. We know this because Christopher Reid, Hughes’s editor at Faber and Faber for the last eight years of his life, says he received from Hughes only letters at a time when there were already easier options; most writers who still shun the word processor in favour of a legal pad or an Underwood 5 for their proper work have long succumbed to email as a form of easy communication. (‘He was rather averse to any kind of mechanical means of writing,’ Reid told me when we spoke on the phone, which serves well enough as a summation of everything he produced.)
In 1995, Hughes was asked by the Paris Review what tools he needed to complete his work
, and he replied, ‘Just a pen.’ He says he made an interesting discovery about himself when he worked as a script reader for a film company in his mid-twenties. He was writing directly into a typewriter for the first time, and he noticed that his sentences had become three times as long: ‘My subordinate clauses flowered and multiplied and ramified away down the length of the page.’
Then he made another discovery. For several years he was a judge on the W.H. Smith children’s writing prize. In the early days of the competition most of the entries were just a few pages long, but in the 1980s they suddenly started stretching to 70 or 80 pages. They were usually fluent and commanding, but they were ‘without exception strangely boring’. Not long afterwards he found that these stories were all composed on word processors, and reasoned that as the tools for putting words on a page ‘become more flexible and externalized, the writer can get down almost every thought or every extension of thought.’ Rather than being an advantage, Hughes found ‘it just extends everything slightly too much. Every sentence is too long. Everything is taken a bit too far, too attenuated.’ But the old-fashioned alternative continued to exert the same ‘terrible resistance’: when writing by pen, ‘every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand . . . As you force your expression against that built-in resistance, things become automatically more compressed, more summary and, perhaps, psychologically denser.’ He wondered whether this was perhaps an age thing: whether, if your first experience of writing is on a computer screen, your wiring is necessarily different, dictated by a different syntactic experience in the brain. The brain-to-hand synapses aren’t absent from computer work, when one is merely tapping a keyboard. ‘Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously drawing.’
Letters of Ted Hughes was published in 2007 and is one of the great modern collections. (It’s not The Letters of Ted Hughes, because that might denote some sort of completion or finality. This collection runs to 700 pages; its editor says the complete letters may fill four volumes.) The author didn’t write his memoirs (or at least not in prose), and no full biography yet exists (his wife Carol Hughes announced in 2013 that she planned to write her memoirs before she forgot what they were). But the letters may be all you really need. The collection functions as a narrative of a life (it pulls you through all the career shunts and geographical turns, all the emotional hotspots), but it also lays a clear path for the reader to follow his progression as a writer. There is so much passionate thinking about the creative process, so much hard-won wisdom about the core of living and the behaviour of others, that when one learns about this particular life it is hard not to reflect upon one’s own. Hughes described letter-writing as ‘excellent training for conversation with the world’, but it is easy to believe that his letters were not training at all; they were the entire polished dialogue.