Authors: Thomas Mallon
Over the years, diarists who’ve read
A Book of One’s Own
have sent me a wonderful heap of letters (“I guess I just couldn’t resist
one more opportunity to put my thoughts on paper”), and the only querulous note I believe they’ve struck has always come as an interrogative:
How could you have left out …?
I’m afraid it will be the same here, with only space limitations, and a belief that it’s better to convey enthusiasm than obligation, as my mitigating pleas.
Some things are quite different about this new book. Diarists are a less numerous and
odder
lot than letter writers: the assassin and the masochist and the crackpot Elizabethan astrologer, all denizens of
A Book of One’s Own
, are more drawn to unanswerable monologue than to exchange. There are, for sure, plenty of flamboyant characters in the pages that follow—I wouldn’t trade Flannery O’Connor, FDR and Madame de Sévigné for any of the aforementioned three—but they are writing in a form, letters, that has been used by almost every literate person. If the material feels less rarefied than the diaries
in A Book of One’s Own
, it may also feel more welcoming and accessible. One common feature is indisputable: the pleasure to be had in violating someone’s privacy. Whether we’re reading his diaries or her letters, we’re reading material that wasn’t intended for us—at least originally.
If this book seems less antic than the earlier one, so is the author finally publishing it. I was a young man when I wrote
A Book of One’s Own
, and while I’m fond of certain stretches, some overeager portions of it make me cringe a little, in the same healthy way one recoils a bit when rereading one’s own diaries—or letters. The chance to get your hands on the latter comes infrequently—perhaps when a lover throws them back in your face, or the parent who saved them dies—but if you don’t find the experience at least slightly mortifying, then something’s gone wrong with your growth.
There’s a difference in the
reading
of diaries and letters, not just in the writing of them. From the first genre, one is getting the whole story; however selective, the diary is the total narrative that the author chose to provide. A letter is rarely more than half the story; if its forerunner or reply aren’t available, one has to infer the other half of the conversation, which can be as frustrating as listening to a cell-phone caller on the train. There are signs, however, that the genres are blending. The blog would seem to hover between
the two, as half diary, half letter-to-the-world, a sign that we are entering the post-private age at least partly of our own free will.
For six months of the year 2000, when blogging barely had a name, a magazine editor named Paul Tough ran a website called Open Letters. As Dinitia Smith reported in
The New York Times:
“There was one from a man confronting his estranged wife, who was spending the night with another man; another from a 29-year-old woman having chemotherapy; and one from a well-known author who uses his bird feeders as a distraction from writing.” (How unexotic this already sounds in the age of YouTube and Wonkette!) The real sign that the era of the blog was being hatched came with Smith’s taking note of how “Some of the letters became mini-series that readers followed.”
Yours Ever
is organized roughly around the circumstances motivating each chapter’s worth of letters. Life being the chaotic thing it is and letters being the associative catchall they are, there is nothing very categorical about the categories. The chapter divisions are, in fact, even more porous than they were in
A Book of One’s Own
, and aside from asking “How could you have left out …,” readers are entitled to object that some collection discussed in “Advice” really belongs in “Confession,” just as bits of “Friendship,” “Complaint,” “Love” and “War” may have strayed from their proper habitats. I can only reply that sorting the various bundles and collections has sometimes felt like herding cats.
This judgmental survey is offered not as an exercise in nostalgia but a series of glimpses into a still-living literature. This is a book whose text bows down to its bibliography, one that presents itself as a kind of long cover letter to the cornucopia of titles listed back there. If, from what follows, a reader feels inspired to seek out any of those volumes, to consume them at length or in toto, I will have no cause to regret the anything-but-swift completion of my appointed rounds.
Washington, D.C.
June 4, 2009
*
More or less foreseeing the telephone, Lamb writes that posting a letter is like “whispering through a long trumpet.”
We are by September and yet my flowers are bold as June. Amherst has gone to Eden
.
Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Holland, October 1870
“REAL TIME”
—which isn’t time at all, but rather simultaneity—seems these days always to be our goal in communicating between one place and another. So much so that one must ask: was the old passage of days and weeks, as letters traveled, “false time”?
A telephone call or instant message actually conveys one
place
to another, whereas letters always conveyed not only a place but a time as well, one that had already passed. If written vividly enough, they made the recipient forget that what he was reading about had actually taken place weeks before—the way an astronomer looking at the explosion of a star has to remember that he is in fact looking into the past, at something that happened ages ago and whose light is only now being delivered.
Distance—the fact that you are there and I am not—is the hardest fact against which letters were for centuries written, even if the distance was short and temporary, as it was between Elizabeth Holland in New York and Emily Dickinson in Massachusetts. Letters talked across it with information and sentiment, putting themselves at the service of both practical necessity and emotional luxury. Here in this first chapter we have news from elsewhere, letters containing anything at all and nothing in particular, catchall correspondence that never would have come into existence had its writer, or reader, just stayed home.
THE WARRING
red and white roses of Lancaster and York still bloom against all the black ink spilled throughout the fifteenth century by one embattled Norfolk family. The Paston Letters are a medieval document-drama, crammed with besieged castles, arranged marriages, tournaments, knightings, plague, lawsuits, highwaymen, pilgrimages and falconry. The members of the prosperous but always-imperilled Paston clan—along with their retainers, allies, patrons and foes—create, year by year, a sort of prose
Canterbury Tales
, a chronicle ripe with cunning and calamity. Each packet of “tidings” between home and London (where a father or brother is usually pursuing family interests) nearly bursts its seal with urgency. So much
depends
on these letters. When the Pastons ask for news of one another, they’re not being polite. They require tidings on the spot. In the decades just before Richard III offered his kingdom for a horse, the Pastons would have given at least one manor house for a telephone.
At the heart of this multigenerational mini-series stand Margaret Paston and her husband John, a lawyer often away at the capital’s Inner Temple. Affection and gossip aren’t absent from their correspondence, but when Margaret wishes that John “be not chary of writing letters,” and tells him she “would have one every day,” she’s asking that they be stuffed with information, not sealed with a kiss. The two-way traffic is, if anything, more crucial to him than her. Margaret offers, for example, her sense of what the local poor are wishing from the parliament in which her husband now sits: “they live in hope that you should set a way that they might live in better peace in this country than they have done before, and that wool should be provided for so that it should not go out of this land as it has been allowed to do before.” She gives John warnings of his enemies (“I pray you heartily beware how you walk there and have a good fellowship with you when you walk out. The Lord Moleyns has a company of scoundrels with him that care not what they do”), and she supplies news of their predations close to home. Most spectacular is her report, on October 27, 1465, of how the duke of Suffolk’s
men have come to one Paston property and “ransacked the church and bore away all the goods that were left there, both of ours and of the tenants, and even stood upon the high altar and ransacked the images and took away those that they could find, and put the parson out of the church till they had done, and ransacked every man’s house in the town five or six times.”
At less turbulent moments, Margaret uses her letters to remind John that their sons need hats, or that she had no decent necklace to wear when the queen visited Norwich. She has, to say the least, a strong practical streak. Shortly after John is released from a brief stay in Fleet Prison, she reminds him to bring some “pewter vessels, 2 basins, 2 ewers and 12 candlesticks” home for Christmas. John Paston sometimes complains about how things are being managed in his absence (“I pray you put all your wits together and see to the reform of it”), but more often he has reason to compliment his wife’s fearlessness: “I recommend me to you and thank you for your labour and diligence against the unruly fellowship that came before you on Monday last, of which I have heard report by John Hobbs. In good faith you acquit yourself right well and discreetly, and much to your worship and mine, and to the shame of your adversaries.”
The Pastons’ wealth was vastly increased by an inheritance from Sir John Fastolf, a rich Knight of the Garter to whom John Paston rendered long friendship and legal counsel. Fastolf’s last will and testament—itself a sort of letter, through which the author speaks of many matters from beyond the grave—assured a constant volley of arrows and writs between the Pastons and those who sought to overturn their benefactor’s wishes.
These struggles lasted many years beyond John Paston’s death in 1466, after which two of Margaret’s sons, both named John, continued to receive her strong-willed, advice-filled letters. The eldest, Sir John (or John II), was a courtier of King Edward
IV
, better at holding on to a jouster’s lance than money. Having irritated his father (“I see in him,” John Sr. wrote Margaret, “no disposition towards discretion nor self-control”), John II is now the constant object of his mother’s scoldings. Usually in London instead of at the contested Paston properties, he exasperates her with his absence
and pleas of poverty. She can’t believe how infrequently he writes or, after five years, that he has still not had his father’s gravestone made. She tells him that one lord “reports better of you than I think you deserve,” and that she will not be responsible for his debts, not when her own encircled estates are bringing in so little: “We beat the bushes and have the loss and disworship, and other men have the birds.”
Sir John will protest that his presence at court is important to the family’s interests, but his younger brother (John III) is the one literally left holding the fort. John III warns him that “your folk think that you have forgotten them,” and suggests he spend more time with his tenants and less on his tournaments. John II does send some men to help defend the estate at Caister against the duke of Norfolk, but he doesn’t show up himself to help, a dereliction that prompts his mother’s most bitter letter of all:
I greet you well, letting you know that your brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister, and are lacking in victuals. Daubeney and Berney are dead and others badly hurt, and gunpowder and arrows are lacking. The place is badly broken down by the guns of the other party, so that, unless they have hasty help, they are likely to lose both their lives and the place, which will be the greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman …
Before one begins thinking of Johns II and III as those latter-day scions of Brideshead—the wastrel Sebastian and the rule-bound Bridey, with Margaret, in between, as Lady Marchmain—one should turn to the non-emergency letters that passed between the brothers, often on the subject of John III’s search for a wife. The elder John does his best to help with a number of candidates, including one properous, immovable widow: “she prayed me that I should not labour further therein, for she would hold by such answer as she had given you before.” When John III all on his own finally secures a bride, John II appears displeased not to have been needed: “This matter is gone so far without my counsel, so I pray you make an end of it without my counsel.”
Even more than a suitable wife, John III craves a serviceable bird, so that he might get some exercise and society through falconry: “If I have not a hawk I shall grow fat for lack of labour and dead for lack of company, by my troth. No more, but I pray God send you all your desires and me my mewed goshawk in haste … There is a grocer dwelling right over against the well with two buckets a little way from St. Helen’s, who always has hawks to sell …” What the older sibling finally produces is “as good as lame in both her legs, as every man’s eye may see,” but John III thanks him for trying.
The two seem most like brothers when John II writes about the Turk at court with a penis “as long as his leg” (and asks John III to be careful about showing this letter to Mother), or when the two of them ally against the family’s chaplain, James Gloys, who has developed too much of a hold over Margaret. “Sir James and I are at odds,” reports John III to his older brother. “We fell out before my mother, with ‘Thou proud priest’ and ‘Thou proud squire’, my mother taking his side, so I have almost burned my boats as far as my mother’s house is concerned; yet summer will be over before I get me any master.” A year after this incident, John II congratulates John III on the chaplain’s death. “I am right glad that [our mother] will now do somewhat by your advice. Wherefore beware henceforth that no such fellow creeps in between her and you …”
Gloys had sometimes composed Margaret’s letters for her, an activity that left the younger Pastons open to his manipulations. Margaret should have understood their sensitivity on this point. Shortly after her husband’s death, it was she who had counseled John II: “beware that you keep securely your writings that are of value, so that they do not come into the hands of those that may harm you hereafter. Your father … in his troublous time set more store on his writings and evidence than he did by any of his movable goods.”