Authors: Thomas Mallon
One enjoys Hearn most, however, when he pulls back from the infinite and grandiose and takes a look at what’s in front of him: the light of today, August 28, 1893, when “the shadows are sharp as the edge of a knife;” the Japanese eyelid, whose superior beauty he explains in a brilliant piece of physiognomic observation; or the national variant of archery that involves “shooting at a paper lantern at night.” His wife remains a partial mystery, but he notes her clever and agreeable behavior, including the shrewdness she displays in hiding, rather than mailing, an envelope he handed her in a bad mood.
His views are forever proclaiming and then disowning themselves. Hearn was indeed made for letter writing instead of chess, at which he would probably try to play both black and white. Four years after arriving in Japan, he calls himself “a disillusioned enthusiast,” regretting the way he once “described horrible places as
gardens of paradise, and horrid people as angels and divinities.” But the angels and devils never cease switching sides. Hearn changes his mind about his students; declares that even in the slick new Japan “the Japanese are still the best people in the world to live among;” finds that in some respects Shinto may be preferable to Buddhism after all; and successively decides that the Japanese won’t, will, won’t be able to resist foreign influence.
When making the occasional delicate apology to Chamberlain (“I am sorry to have praised to you stories you do not like”), Hearn can sound almost Japanese himself. But when he scolds himself for allowing a letter to go on too long, it’s ourselves we recognize, since the only epistolary apology more familiar than this is the one we make for having taken so long to write in the first place. In Hearn’s own case, the mass production of words is necessary to a mind always having its own ideas “reconstructed, repaired, renovated, and decorated”—a mind locked in a jiujitsu match with itself.
THE PRINCIPAL REQUIREMENT
for homesickness is having a home to begin with. Hearn was so rootless and peripatetic that he can’t really be said to meet the condition. The letters we best know him by are not to his nearest and dearest but to a professional acquaintance, and as such they stand apart from the sort of letters—written with longing, memory, sheer need—by which we typically come to understand any person who’s had to write when far from home.
We wouldn’t—would we?—go to William Faulkner for that kind of letter. What would a writer so elusive and opaque offer in the way of such simple, familiar feelings? As it happens, after opening the letters he sent home from his youthful Northern travels, a reader amasses enough evidence—as if performing what the legal profession charmingly calls “discovery”—to make a case for Faulkner’s callowness and ordinary vulnerability. There he is, during and after the First World War, up in Connecticut and New York and Canada, telling his parents all that’s happening, but writing letters mostly to receive them, as the homesick have always done.
On April 5, 1918, after a long stretch of newsy chatter from New
Haven, where he’s just arrived, he bursts out with a single-sentence confession of need (“I’m terribly lonesome”) before signing off “Love, Billy” and no doubt running to post the letter before he becomes embarrassed and changes his mind. A day later he assures his parents that he “shan’t starve;” the restaurants are clean, and he can get coffee, toast and eggs for a quarter. Still, this twenty-year-old fellow needs mothering: “As regards sending me clothes—shirts—shirts—shirts. And please, Mother dear, make them with
one
button instead of
2
at the collar.”
For the next couple of months he’s a peculiar outsider, a literary young man working ordinary jobs in a town where other young men are strutting toward their gentlemen’s Cs within the gates of Yale. There are times here, one realizes, that Faulkner must have felt more set apart than Quentin Compson, who in
The Sound and the Fury
would at least be a registered student at Harvard.
In the middle of 1918, seeking opportunity for the quickest advancement, Faulkner entered the British military instead of the American, training for the RAF in Canada. The editor of his letters from this particular period judges them more confident than homesick, but to most readers the new airman will still seem to be in short pants rather than a white scarf. Though he hates to ask for it, Faulkner could use ten dollars from his folks; he doesn’t even have money for stamps. The senior men he describes seem just as marvelous and remote to
him
as they must to his parents back in Mississippi: “I wish you could see some of these flight sergeants and mechanics—fierce mustaches and waists like corset models and tiny caps and swagger sticks.” During the flu epidemic, Faulkner drinks a lot of milk, remaining healthy but then having to face the sudden end of the war, which makes his months of training moot: “They have started dismantling the ‘planes and putting them away, a job that has been most magnanimously given to us.”
Throughout his young adulthood, Faulkner seems less a harbinger of modernism than a figure out of Booth Tarkington. His humor and style remain a boy’s. In the letters addressed to her, Mrs. M. C. Falkner (the “u” would be her son’s later affectation) is sometimes “Mother,” sometimes “Moms,” and sometimes “Momsey.”
Billy sends candy home to his little brother, Dean, and wants to be remembered to his “Mammy,” Caroline Barr. During his first stint in New Haven, he delightedly conveys to his mother the humor of Ray Noon, the Irish housemate who has “just wandered in and said—‘Give her my love, Bill’—taking it that I was writing to a flapper. I told him it was you, and he said—‘Then be sure and send my message, and tell her we have only had to get you out of jail twice.’” Mrs. Falkner sends cakes to her son for years, and he guards them when his pals crowd in like “vultures.” Billy insists that being “naturally rather unapproachable” helps to fend the others off, but he’s tenderhearted enough to buy a “pink ice-cream soda” for a newsboy who reminds him of Dean, whom he misses so much “I almost dream about him every night.”
When Faulkner returns to New Haven a few years after the war, a racial and regional smugness have settled over him. He blows hard to his mother, refusing to believe that Northern “niggers are as happy and contented as ours are, all this freedom does is to make them miserable because they are not white.” It will serve him right, a month later in New York, when he has to write that “the other dishwashers, Greeks and one Irish, thought I was a wop, and looked down on me.” His first subway ride proves repellent: “The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice.” Struggling to break into magazines, he finds that he’s got competition throughout Greenwich Village: “all Oshkosh is here with portfolios of strange verse and stranger pictures under one arm.” He lands a job at Lord & Taylor, but the department store’s management proves so unfriendly he has to tell his mother not to “send any more mail to the store.”
The young Faulkner is an appealingly self-conscious letter-writer, curious about epistolary form, the way it both mirrors and distorts human action. He can be “having such a hurried life that all [his] letters sound disjointed,” but on the other hand, mail from home takes so long to reach him that “things happen and then un-happen by the time I hear of them.” Faulkner will complain of being unable to remember what he intended to write once he finally gets the chance to pick up a pen, though a few weeks earlier
he’d scolded himself for allowing a moderately long letter written at different sittings to turn into something more like a diary. After realizing that his awful penmanship is causing some of his letters to get lost in the mail, he vows to start putting a return address on the envelope. Mixing sweetness and strut during his RAF days, he tells his mother that every time one of his letters does make it through, “I feel a certain pleasurable glow of exultation, as though I had downed a Hun machine.”
By 1925, during a productive half-year in New Orleans that will have him metamorphosing from poet to novelist, Faulkner keenly begins to feel himself a writer. (Indeed, he sometimes Writes as determinedly as Elinore Stewart: “Sky all full of fat white clouds like little girls dressed up and going to a party.”) Along with verse and fiction, he’s turning out newspaper sketches that are almost literally potboilers: “They want some short things,” he explains to his mother, “about 200 words with a kick at the end. I can knock off one of them while I’m waiting for my teakettle to boil.” The longer ones, he believes, are fit for a scrapbook, and his work is provoking fan letters from “strange females” who’ve seen the author’s picture in
The Times-Picayune
. A new bumptiousness infuses his correspondence; he pronounces his novel-in-progress “very good” and boasts of having put down “7000 words in one day this week.” By the summer of ‘25 he can tell his mother that writing letters has become a busman’s holiday.
Actually, it was the three years between his days in New York and his time in New Orleans that really dimmed the luster of letter writing. Back home during that period, Faulkner supported himself as the University of Mississippi’s postmaster, playing cards and writing on the job and sometimes throwing away letters before they could be delivered. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he declared after being fired, “but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”
THE MODERN TRAVELER’S
iPhone will begin pulling e-mail down from the sky the moment his plane has landed in Ulan Bator,
whereas little more than half a century ago, while studying and traveling abroad, the young V.S. Naipaul could write to his family back in Trinidad and say, almost believably: “I have been in Paris for a week and have only just come across a post office.” Before Xerox and the
SEND ALL
button, dispatching the same news to multiple recipients also required considerable labor from a novelist on the make; as Naipaul explains to Kamla, his sister studying in India: “Writing two copies of a letter is pretty tiring. To write home and then to write to you about the same thing is a heavy task.”
Like the letters Faulkner sent home from New Orleans, the ones Naipaul mails from Oxford show him quickly gaining traction as a writer and fast coming into a sense of his own superiority, though he seems to have been inclined to that almost from birth. As the family prince, its great hope for distinction, “Vido” reports on his social navigation through the university—his attendance at bottle parties, his need for dance lessons—as well as his decidedly unimpressed view of the competition: “There are asses in droves here,” he writes just months after arriving. He has every reason to believe that he “can beat them at their own language.”
The hauteur of this fellow, still a teenager, who likes being called “sir” and believes Jane Austen’s books to be “mere gossip,” makes him scorn fellow passengers on a train as well as the offspring of an uncle who resides in England (“The children nauseate me”). He finds it difficult to be polite, and can’t even beg his family’s pardon for the bad typing in one of his letters without adding: “I have no time nor the desire to correct.” As his sister’s birthday approaches, he tells her: “I shan’t send a card, but I offer my best wishes.”
All the salient personal features of the Nobel Prize winner are on display fifty years before he takes the stage in Stockholm. Misogyny is everywhere in the letters. Patricia Ann Hale, the wife he will make miserable for decades, occasions a premarital assessment, written for his family, that seems in spots more like literary criticism than love: “She is a member of the university, not unintelligent, nor altogether unattractive … About her character: she is good, and simple. Perhaps a bit too idealistic, and this I find on occasion rather irritating.” The Naipaul who will come to dismiss entire civilizations that have offended his intelligence or nose, is up and running
even before he leaves Trinidad. On November 24, 1949, he writes to Kamla, already in India: “My thesis is that the world is dying—Asia today is only a primitive manifestation of a long-dead culture; Europe is battered into a primitivism by material circumstances; America is an abortion.”
But between the broadest brushstrokes one sees a corresponding love of precision and cool: “This is my last day in Paris. I have not been having a wonderful time, as all good postcard-writers say. I have been having a quiet, agreeable stay.” The young man who “hate[s] writing badly, at any time” speaks of “the process of my emergence” and reports from Oxford that “when I do write an essay it turns out to be a really excellent one. This is not boasting; for my tutor is truly impressed.” Any doubts he may have about a paper he’s to deliver to his college’s literary society are dispelled as soon as it’s been given: “This morning someone told me that my paper was by far the brightest he had ever heard at the society. So it appears that I still retain some of the old fire.” He is nineteen years old.
But the rejection of his novel seems to unleash the full force of suppressed loneliness, and early in 1952, Naipaul suffers what even he is not too proud to call a nervous breakdown. He pleads with the family back in Trinidad (“My love to all, and don’t forget me”), though it is only to Kamla that he can make himself truly vulnerable. She urges him not to hold back: “Tell me everything and, believe me, I’ll understand.” Even before the breakdown, Naipaul had beseeched her: “Please keep me alive with letters.” Their epistolary relationship can be stormy, scolding, interrupted by the sort of regrets that can cost extra postage. As Naipaul explains to those back home: “Just last night I tore up a letter that I had written to Kamla—on an air-letter form too. I get into certain moods and write things which, when read the following morning, read badly and are usually disgustingly maudlin.”
In a collection of the Naipaul family’s correspondence, a reader sees Kamla, during the years of her own university exile, becoming not so much older and wiser as a little harder and sadder. She at one point advances to her brother the theory that it’s “best to marry the person who is mad after you—almost worships you—than
marry one you love.” It is difficult for her and Naipaul to have any relationship that exists outside the vexed and loving context of the family that remains far away on a third continent entirely. Letters from one Naipaul to another often involve a kind of emotional triangulation, at once delicate and manipulative. During one bad misunderstanding, Vido receives this request from his father: “Please explain to [Kamla] and say we love her and want her home for her own sake and not for any money she may have to give to us.”