To the Letter
Page 41
* Verbum sapienti sat est, meaning ‘a word is enough to the wise’ or ‘enough said’.
* This letter, and others to Aurelia Plath, reside in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington.
* Some will never make it to the definitive collection: recently I asked Al Alvarez whether Plath had ever written to him about her situation towards the end. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. And? ‘And I burnt them all after she died, out of respect.’ Did he regret this now? ‘Absofuckinglutely.’
* Although only a handful of Bessie Moore’s letters have survived, it is clear from Chris Barker’s replies that only a few failed to find him at his various camps. And we know that almost all of his letters made it back to England. This was a remarkable wartime feat. The Post Office began planning for war in 1937, strengthening regional offices in anticipation of the aerial bombardment of London. When war broke out, a great deal of care was taken to establish the Army Postal Service, with letters to and from troops deemed essential to the maintenance of morale.
Domestically, volumes of mail remained steady; the biggest reduction was in the posting of football pools following the cessation of professional matches – the pools coupons accounted for 7 per cent of all letters sent. But the particular problems encountered with overseas letters (not least the closure of regular shipping channels and the impossibility of sending mail through Italy) would hit those stationed in North Africa particularly. Ships were obliged to sail via Cape Town to reach Egypt, and could take two months to arrive; Chris and Bessie devised a numbering system to indicate which letter they were replying to. A limited amount of mail (at an exorbitant minimum rate of 1s. 3d. per half-ounce letter) was also carried in the cargo holds of planes. Bessie could not afford this luxury, but she did take advantage of the ‘airgraph’ service that had been introduced in 1941. This involved writing a letter on a special sheet, taking it to the post office to be photographed on microfilm, and then transmitted to a receiving post that would print the letter and deliver it to the recipient. More than 135 million letters were sent this way before the end of the war.
* In another sci-fi inspired phrase (it was still perhaps difficult to see it as anything but space-age), in 1962 Licklider called his vision a ‘galactic’ network, which we may now appropriate either as the entire Internet or just the Cloud. He got another thing correct too – the concept of a universal common library that would house all the world’s knowledge, the first time this had been thought feasible for more than two millennia.
* He also found a way to deliver a message that didn’t require the recipient to be there at the time. In interviews he underlines that this was a personal quest performed ‘off the clock’ when he should have been concentrating on something else.
* In 2013, email responses had increased to 45 per cent.
* The origin of SWALK is uncertain, but the common wisdom attributes it to American soldiers in the Second World War. There are others, with varying geography and spelling:
NORWICH – Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home
ITALY: I Trust And Love You
FRANCE: Friendship Remains And Never Can End
BURMA: Be Undressed Ready My Angel
MALAYA – My Ardent Lips Await Your Arrival
CHINA – Come Home I’m Naked Already
VENICE – Very Excited Now I Caress Everywhere
EGYPT – Eager to Grab Your Pretty Tits
* I am grateful for this quotation to Christa Hammerle’s essay ‘You Let a Weeping Woman Call You Home?’ in Epistolary Selves, edited by Rebecca Earle, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999.
* Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, ed. Peter Y. Sussman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. J.K. Rowling’s review appeared in the Sunday Telegraph.
* There are no precise figures; it would be impossible to calculate the commercial traffic of the personal letter (as opposed to a business one or a circular). A letter with a handwritten address may provide a pointer, but the national postal services do not track such things through automated systems. The Royal Mail, does, however, maintain records of the number of personally addressed letters posted annually, defining a letter as anything that is not a parcel (the figure thus includes marketing mail). The figures have increased steadily since 1980–81, from 9.96 billion in that year to 12.53 billion in 1986–87 and 16.36 billion in 1992–93. The peak was reached in 2004–05 with 20.19 billion, followed by a steady decline. The figure was 18.04 billion in 2008–09 and 16.64 billion in 2009–10. In 2011–12 it was 15.14 billion. The preliminary result for the year ended 31 March 2013 was 13.86 billion.
* It’s difficult not to mention Wilde’s idiosyncratic postal system without also mentioning the exalted letter he could not send. De Profundis, written on 20 sheets of paper in Reading Gaol in the last months before his release in May 1897, is a study of sorrow, beauty and the position of the outcast, and it begins with plaintive regret: ‘Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you . . .’
What follows is an unapologetic account of an aesthete’s life – his search for the exquisite in all things, his extravagances, his questing passions with Lord Alfred Douglas – and an account of the artistic consolations of a life devoted to Christ. Unable to send the letter from jail, he gave it to his friend Robbie Ross on his release, with instructions for it to be typed twice, whereupon certain passages were misread and excised. The original manuscript is held at the British Museum, where we may marvel at the succulent depths of his language and the calm certainty of his convictions.
‘I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,’ Wilde writes. ‘There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.’
* A married couple from Australia famed for their ‘telepathy’.
* Octavius was an import-exporter; the sinew he mentions is believed to have been an important element in the building of catapults. The word ‘brother’ in these greetings should often be read as ‘comrade’.
* See Chapter Fourteen.
* Both Solemnis and Paris are believed to be slaves in a cohort of Batavians, one of the two principal units at Vindolanda in the period AD 85–130. The other was the Tungrian cohort.
* The number of question marks in this passage exposes the translator’s dilemma. But the word ‘translator’ is in itself inadequate: a phalanx of historians, palaeographers and linguistic experts have pored over these texts in the past decades, analysing the smallest curvature on the faintest letterform, cross-referencing indistinct names and locations, and piecing together logical textual and physical combinations – the ultimate lexicologist’s jigsaw. And then there is the problem of wider contextual interpretation, a task akin to reconstructing a forest from scattered bracken. It is scholarship for which the inexpert modern enthusiast can only be inestimably grateful.
* If a letter was particularly urgent, the folded and sealed papyrus would sometimes be addressed ‘To Antogonus – now’.
* ‘If you’re well, that’s good – all’s well with me.’
* ‘Caesar’s Body Shook’, London Review of Books, 22 September 2011.
* There were probably more; this is what survives. Seneca’s letters were rather longer than the norm, ranging from 149 to 4,134
words, with an average of 955, or some 10 papyrus sheets joined on a roll. Philological scholars with time on their hands have calculated that a sheet of papyrus of approximately 9 x 11 inches contained an average of 87 words, and that a letter rarely exceeded 200 words. Cicero’s letters ran from 22 to 2530 words, with an average of 295.