Back in 2010 I wrote “The Perils of Modern Correspondence” which in large part was a lamentation of the world’s decreasing population of letters—bona fide letters assembled with paragraphs and substantive content, and yes, even on occasion, those styled by one’s very own hand. The post began:
“Once upon a time, and in a time that predates the invention of the microprocessor, the telephone, and even the telegraph, people had the option of either addressing one another in person or via letter. And when reading the biographies of various painters, writers, and musicians of the past few centuries one is immediately aware of, and can scarcely ignore, the significance of letter-writing—a vital part of remaining in touch with those close to us, and too a vital component of the progression of one’s particular craft.”
At its conclusion:
“There are so many extraordinary books out there written about the correspondences of the past, some of which include: Words in Air, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Letters on Cézanne, Flaubert—Sand, One Art, and of course, Chopin’s Letters.
But I am left wondering; fifty years from now, will there even be enough letters to produce this kind of book about those who have lived and worked in this new era of correspondence?
The day of the letter, of graciousness—is it gone?”
A few years later, these questions still stand; but in an era where our somewhat collective lexicon continues to include items such as #, thx, omg, lol, btw, brb, lmao and so on, it would be fair to say I remain dubious.
Still, I’d like to believe there is hope for the poor, ailing letter—and imagine, at the very least, messages of weight and consequence are still being written and read even if rarely on paper and mostly on screens of varying shapes and sizes. So rather than lamenting once again, I chose to dive into (or get quite lost in) the extraordinary and voluminous correspondence between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, one that spanned 30 years and yielded hundreds of letters and has been wonderfully documented and edited in the book Words in Air. (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008)
Lowell and Bishop met for the first time in 1947 in New York at a dinner party hosted by poet and critic Randall Jarrell and what followed was aptly described in the book’s introduction:
“Bishop and Lowell were poets preoccupied with loss and with the curious, indistinct borderline between public and private, fiction and fact. In studying each other’s lives and art while following their own “so different natures and destinies” each learned to expand his or her artistic reach across their common ground. Their poetry would very likely have been different, if they had not met.”
And speaking of that which is dissimilar, their poetry was as dissimilar as could be. In William Logan’s review in the New York Times he writes of their divergent styles, “His heavy-handed youthful verse, solemnly influenced by Allen Tate, laid down a metrical line like iron rail...Her whimsical eye and wry, worried poems condemned her to be a treated like a minor disciple of Marianne Moore. Bishop for much of her life was a poet’s poet, which means a poet without an audience.”
They were, it seems, each other’s audience of one. The one that mattered the most, or, frankly, at all—and not only when it came to discussions of stanzas and meter and translation, of where one might teach in the year to come, of meeting with Pound or other notables, of whether to return to Yaddo yet again, but in all things, and through all things.
“Through wars, revolutions, breakdowns, brief quarrels, failed marriages and love affairs, and intense poetry-writing jags, the letters kept coming.”
459 letters in total.
“For each, personally as well as artistically, these letters became a part of their abidance: a part of that huge block of life they had lived together and apart over thirty years of witty and intimately confiding correspondence.”
Such a longstanding exchange certainly prompts me to consider what constitutes a life—what lends it meaning and how two people so unalike in some significant ways, living out their lives in wildly contrasting manners can find in and through each other novel ways of seeing and being and creating. And how the very act of writing and exchanging letters, these words in air, could render one who is geographically so far so very near.
Ongoing study of letters and other personal writing such as the diary has led some to suggest both modes of writing as literary endeavors or even genres. Historians, biographers, and other scholars regularly comb through texts considered to be of an intimate, private nature; and often what is found greatly augments their ability to construct a thorough portrait of a given life or subject. As to whether or not these intimate writing formats are artifacts, literature or otherwise—I will happily leave that to others to debate. I am far less interested in the scholar’s categorization and far more curious about the psychology at hand. And with these two poets, these two selves in air, there is plenty of that to go around.
In both letters and diaries, there is an assertion of self, even a construction of self. Though a diary may appear to have no audience, many diarists write and have written as though someone is listening, as though someone is there (even if that someone is their own self). Tolstoy is a great example of a diarist who defies commonplace assumptions of the format. He kept one from age 18 to age 82 and considered the practice a continuous experiment marked by endless self-inquiry and self-analysis:
1884
Why can’t I talk to the children: to Tanya? Seryozha is impossibly obtuse. The same castrated mind that his mother has. If you two should ever read this, forgive me; it hurts me terribly.
With the letter, and the presence of its addresser and addressee, it is implied that one’s words will be met by someone. By someone else, by someone else’s mind. And yet stamp or no stamp, the elasticity of both the diary and the letter permits substantial cross-over. Virginia Woolf, a noted self-conscious diarist, called the diary a “capacious hold-all”—and the same could be said for the letter.
But back to the psychological underpinnings of whatever these two selves might have termed whatever it was they had doggedly pursued for 30 years. Lowell and Bishop, two poets, two people with documented differences, were not without more than a few commonalities. Perhaps of seminal importance are their early childhood experiences both marked by loss and trauma. Whether the death of a parent, the absence of a secure bond with one, or being witness to nightly verbal discord between terribly mismatched parents, both learned at rather young ages that the world was not, by default, a safe, peaceful, and predictable residence. Instead, the days of their youth involved something psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow articulates so well:
“…the existential meaning of emotional trauma lies in the shattering of what I call the absolutisms of everyday life—the system of illusory beliefs that allows us to function in the world.”
As I look at three decades of interstate and intercontinental transmissions, in sickness and health, in sickness and sickness, I see the tenacious coupling of two psyches—and with and through each missive a confirmation that indeed the other was still there. They did not abandon one another. In the abstract of an article titled “’If someone is there’ On finding and knowing one’s own mind.”, the author writes, “…this paper suggests that the possession of memory and the feeling of having one’s own mind is a capacity that is developed in relational space; “if someone is there” (Winnicott). In the absence of being able to feel the impact of one’s mind on others, memory will be dissociated.”
“…that the ability to feel ownership of one’s own mind, and to tell even the saddest memories, must arise in the understanding that one’s own mind matters to other people.” (Slavin, 2014)
By way of their letters they were confirming and reconfirming that indeed someone is there, and that their minds mattered to one another, profoundly so, and this was paramount. For two scarred souls, it was everything.
I’ll write about the translation next time--- Heavens----I see you’re almost gone----I’ll write again though.
A simple last line from one of Bishop’s letters. Of course, he was not gone, not yet anyway, and she wrote again. And again. And Lowell did the same.
Thank you for this compelling exploration of the self and personal relationships through letters.
Posted by: Michelle Rodino-Colocino | June 25, 2016 at 11:40 AM
Thank you, Michelle!
Posted by: Amy Allara | June 25, 2016 at 05:57 PM