The love letters he wrote
ALIST of the things we miss in the digital age was topped by mix tapes, those DIY compilations of fave hits on cassettes. Handwritten letters and love letters were also on the much-missed inventory. And it’s my belief the death of the love letter in particular is a great loss. Getting a text or an email can be delightful (you can study people’s sudden smiles on a train or a bus as their mobiles ping) but a letter is something else. And you can keep it in a shoebox.
My first teen boy- friend was at board- ing school and we corresponded exclusively by letter. In the course of our somewhat tepid relationship we only saw each other a few times before he decided I was too poor a tennis player to be his girlfriend. In fact none of our face-to-face meetings compared with the excitement of getting his letters even though they were long on rugby tries and short on endearments.
You can’t say that about the letters written by the late playwright Harold Pinter to Dame Joan Bakewell which she has handed to the British Library for us all to read. Their secret sevenyear affair took place between 1962-69 while both were married and inspired Pinter’s love triangle play Betrayal which is a dense tapestry of evasion, confession, concealment, cues and clues. If you’ve ever wondered how people can be both intensely intimate and woundingly distant at the same time then this is the play that finds the language to describe it. Extracts from his letters to Joan are passionate, awkward, corny, anxious and raw. Occasionally he is funny – his desire to see her dressed up as a chambermaid in one of their hotel rooms. “Oh love. The dreams. Making love to you. All the images of it. You darling under me. Over me. Always always always. I can’t tell you. O my dear speak to me.” Yes, that sort of thing. It’s impossible to read them without feeling that you should avert your gaze. Love makes lunatics of us all. Bakewell and Pinter used mutual friends to pass these scorching letters backwards and forwards. Phone calls were tricky. Pinter writes in hair-tearing frustration about trying to phone both Joan and one of their intermediaries, Henry Woolf. “Oh my love, I phoned you yesterday… desperately hoping you’d be alone but you weren’t… I’ve phoned H [Woolf] three bloody times, at all times, in the last week but he’s never there… So Christ write write write write. Unless you’ve fallen in love with someone and don’t want to.” Write write write write. I’m so glad they did, along with all the other love letter writers for thousands of years. These bleeding, treacherous, ragged scraps of the human heart are so very eloquent and valuable.
THE man known as “Nick” whose false accusations led to the Westminster paedophile investigation – Operation Midland – has now been charged with child sex offences. But “Nick” will still not be named. If I was one of those whose reputation and life had been trashed thanks to him I’d feel pretty aggrieved about that.