Calvino’s letters reflect his rich imagination and engagement with the world (© Getty Images)
The Selected Letters of Willa Cather eds. Andrew Jewell & Janis Stout (Knopf, £25)
Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985 ed. Michael Wood (Princeton, £27.95)
Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011by JM Coetzee and Paul Auster (Faber, £20)
When I was young, in the 1950s, everyone wrote letters. The schoolteacher, the insurance agent, the social worker; the businessman who read, the lawyer who travelled; my romantic mother, our no-nonsense neighbour: all conducted an often large and varied correspondence. It was the accustomed way for ordinarily educated people to occupy the world beyond one’s own small part of it.
My friends and I were devoted to reading letters as well as writing them. Receiving a letter was an excitement. Almost as soon as you’d finished reading the letter you’d start framing the sentences in your head that you’d be committing to paper when, in a day or two, you sat down to write your reply.
I treasured these hours between the time I got a letter and the time I answered it. I loved ordering my thoughts, deciding on my agenda. What did I want to say and in what order would I say it? How would I arrange fact and impression to let my friend know how things were with me: describe a mood, pass on gossip, think expressively about a book or an event? In short: deliver the kind of information one might get from a story not a memo.
I have before me three volumes of letters written by four distinguished writers. One is the selected letters of Willa Cather; the second, those of Italo Calvino; the third, a four year correspondence between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee. The first two books belong to the world of my youth, the third to that of the present. Together they show both the distinct pleasures that the best letter writing can provide, and the collective loss that our culture has suffered in the transition from traditional written communication to its instant, electronic form.
Willa Cather was born in 1873 and grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska; there she developed the deep and abiding love for the land and its immigrant settlers that became the motive force behind an unbroken flow of novels, stories, and essays that, over a period of some 40 years, made her one of the most widely recognised writers of her time. Her literary acquaintanceship was limited, her involvement with political or social change nonexistent. She lived a very private, measured life—New York in the winter, Nebraska in the summer, New Hampshire in the spring or autumn—but wherever she was she wrote letters.
This collection contains 60 years of Cather’s written outpourings on work, travel, literature; friendships that prosper and friendships that fail; the exhaustion of writing, the anxiety of publication; a storm experienced from the top of a mill tower in Nebraska, the death in war of a cousin, the view from a terrace in Italy. The letters are addressed to friends, family, neighbours; editors, writers, publishers. Although Cather, a lesbian, genuinely loved at least two women in her life—the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung and her housemate of 40 years, Edith Lewis—there is not a single communiqué to either of them in this book. Richly descriptive and gratifyingly engaged as the letters are, civility is the hallmark trait here; civility and formality. For 40 years and more, in letters to intimates and acquaintances alike, Edith Lewis is uniformly referred to as “Miss Lewis.”
Within this context, one letter, written early in the 20th century, is memorable. In 1902 Cather and the future writer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, had gone abroad together. The trip was a disaster; the women came home estranged. Now, two years later, Cather writes to Dorothy:
“I’ve always been conscious that I was ill tempered and ungrateful and that I behaved very childishly abroad two years ago... There is just a terribly low streak of something both ill tempered and ill bred that comes out in me only too often... it’s incredible that any grown person should have behaved as I did. It makes me ill to think of it, it surely does... I suppose I am one of those perverse beings who gets still and haughty when they know they are in the wrong... an ugly thing to admit but it’s only fair to own up to one’s pettiness.”
This is the first part of a long, remarkably self-aware letter that early on guides the reader to those sentences sprinkled throughout the collection that show us, behind the self-protective formality, a Willa Cather who is touchy, scornful, insecure; thorny about her place in American letters, convinced that she’s not getting the recognition due her.
The book is a model of letter writing: it reveals and it illuminates. The author stands before us, planted clearly in the landscape of her daily life, becoming, with each letter, more of a presence in ours.
Italo Calvino’s letters are written out of a life the polar opposite of Cather’s but, taken as a whole, provide a similar pleasure and surprise. Calvino was born in 1923, raised in the Italian coastal town of San Remo, and grew up passionate about literature and politics. After the Second World War he took a university degree in literature, became an editor at the Einaudi publishing house in Turin, and began to write the allegorical fantasies that were to become his life’s work. Between 1960 and his death in 1985 Calvino matured into one of Italy’s most beloved novelists, as well as one of the most admired throughout the reading world.
The more than 600 letters in this collection demonstrate admirably the temperament of a writer whose rich imagination was embedded in the solidity of a man intensely engaged with the world as it is. The joy of these letters is their vivid evocation of that moment at the end of the war when artists and intellectuals all over Europe—and none more so than Calvino—were conducting a passionate conversation about what it meant to make art now, do politics now, address the moral question of how to live now. Among Calvino’s correspondents are the innumerable men and women, both famous and obscure, then at work in Italian literature, film, and philosophy, with whom he could regularly exchange views on the existential problem of life itself.
While many of these long, lively, opinion-filled letters are devoted to the conflicts facing the world in mid-20th century, even more are devoted to Calvino’s literary life. In them he shines as an editor of obvious brilliance and a writer of lavish gratitude toward those who appreciate his work. Thus, it comes as something of a shocker when, in 1975, upon the death of the writer and anti-fascist activist Carlo Levi, Calvino writes to Levi’s widow:
“The image of his life, such a full life, of the inner harmony that was his secret, of his being so serenely himself… continues to appear to me as an absolute standard before which I feel more than ever the bitterness of my own life which is like trying to hold together bits that are collapsing all over the place.”
This letter, I must say, stunned me, and made resonant all that had come before. It too pulled the collection together into a book that irradiated a whole life.
***
JM Coetzee and Paul Auster were born just two decades after Calvino —in 1940 and 1947, respectively—but their letters reflect a deep generational shift in the way writers communicate.
Auster, an American, writes postmodern novels that are obsessed with the mystery of personal identity. Coetzee, a South African now living in Australia, is a Nobel Prize winner who is celebrated for writing allegorical novels about men and women doing unspeakable things to one another under a burning sun in the middle of nowhere. Auster seems a gregarious fellow while Coetzee is famous for his remoteness. At the outset, it seems unlikely that these two should be possessed of sufficiently attuned sensibilities to conduct a correspondence worthy of publication.
The letters—which run between 2008 and 2011—came by way of post, fax, and email. Sometimes they were responded to immediately, sometimes not for weeks or months. Sometimes the letters were as short as a page, sometimes a few pages longer. The brevity was startling to a reader who had just spent weeks in the company of a pair of writers whose letters were lavishly long; but it was not really objectionable. What did prove objectionable was the artificiality of the Coetzee-Auster enterprise.
These letters are, supposedly, an exchange on shared interests between two prodigiously accomplished writers, but they read like an online course in search of an agenda. They set up topics for discussion—sports, friendship, American poetry since the 1960s, the 2008 financial crash—and then each correspondent goes at it as though taking part in a student seminar. The subjects seem randomly decided upon, and no single one of them is pursued as if getting to the bottom of things mattered. At the same time, there are no digressions, no penetrating asides, not a flash of emotional insight on the part of either writer. Opacity is the overriding characteristic of this exchange. After reading this book through I do not know a thing about either Auster or Coetzee that I might not have learned from Wikipedia. If the correspondence had been intellectually impressive all might still have been well; but it is not. Uniformly intelligent and well written, it neither reveals nor illuminates.
The problem is that Coetzee and Auster are writing in a time when letter writing is no longer a way of life. When it was a way of life—that is, a commonly shared practice, not an act of individual will—every educated letter writer knew that it was his or her obligation to shape a piece of experience on the page, even if it was only the experience of abstract opinion. That obligation tapped into a collective fluency that the literate population inhaled with mother’s milk. The fluency ran through the veins, extended down through the arm to the fingertips that held the pen that made the sentences, often causing the humblest of letter writers to produce a conversational ramble that was delightfully composed.
Composed is the key word. Today we live in an age of transmission, which is, by its very nature, at odds with composition. The prime virtue of the former is the delight of spontaneity; the prime virtue of the latter is the deeper one of reflection. Composition gives us the solace of narrative, transmission the excitement of the telegram. To transmit is to deliver a series of connecting signals sent out across the wired surface of consciousness; to narrate is to cut a road in the emotional wilderness. Each performs a stunning task of human intelligence, comparable but not equivalent.
In a way, letter writing is an act of faith. Written in an absorbed solitude where one is alone with one’s thoughts in the conjured presence of another, the letter assumes the existence of humanity; after all, how can one be absolutely sure that one’s correspondent will be there to receive it. Out of that assumption, world and self are generated. Loneliness is sustained, not avoided. You keep yourself company in a room otherwise empty of life; you infuse the silence with the sentience of your imaginary conversation. This requires belief in the actuality of one’s own existence without external confirmation.
The electronic message is all about the assurance provided by the instant reply. Here, loneliness is experienced not as a state of being worth courting but as a frustration, even an anxiety. What is wanted is the quick fix of immediacy: the quick fix of instant response; immediate company; relief from a solitude that is feared more than it is welcomed.
What is now inhaled with mother’s milk is the conviction that an electronic message resembling the 10-word telegram of my childhood is sufficiently connective. And for all any of us know, so it will prove. For the time being what I do know is that good writers like Paul Auster and JM Coetzee, old enough to have been formed by that other time, seem, like the rest of us, to be unavoidably—and adversely—affected by this vital change in the culture.
