Pride, prejudice and a stonking hangover!
A riveting collection of letters reveals the unknown Jane Austen — a catty gossip who loved a drink
BOOK OF THE WEEK MORE LETTERS OF NOTE compiled by Shaun Usher (Canongate £30) JAMES WALTON
When you tell today’s students that in your university days you kept in touch with school friends by writing letters, in my experience they generally react in one of two ways.
either they fall about laughing at such primitive behaviour, like those aliens in the Cadbury’s Smash adverts. Or, worse still, they’re filled with a sudden sympathy for someone who, having apparently grown up around the time of Jane Austen, is even more elderly than they thought.
Yet, in recent years, there’s been a definite revival of interest in this quaint old method of communication. not, of course, that many people are actually writing letters — but there does seem an increasing sense that, almost without us noticing (let alone deciding), something extremely valuable has been lost.
That feeling certainly ran though Simon Garfield’s 2013 book To The Letter, which argued that, ‘emails are a poke, but letters are a caress’. It also helps to explain the huge success of Letters Of note.
After beginning as a website that simply collected interesting letters, the project became a bestselling book and later a stage show with, among others, Ian McKellen and Benedict Cumberbatch — making this sequel both inevitable and enormously welcome.
As ever, the letters come in no particular order. An excited David Bowie responding to his first American fan letter in 1967 (‘I hope one day to get to America’) is followed by a surprisingly generous Sam Goldwyn congratulating Walt Disney on the ‘wonderful’ Mary Poppins, and then an agonised William Wordsworth talking about the death of his six-year-old son: ‘I dare not say in what state of mind I am; I loved the boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable.’
BuT, in a way, this randomness is precisely the point — because nothing, the book suggests (and proves), can give us such instant, vivid and intimate glimpses into such a wide range of emotions as letters do.
On virtually every page, we’re plunged deep into the heart of the writer, whether joyfully, painfully or, quite often, disconcertingly.
Take love letters, where even the most straightforward declarations of affection tend to come accompanied by something darker, such as jealousy, guilt or, in Dylan Thomas’s case, drunken self-pity.
Writing to his wife from new York, Thomas begins: ‘O Caitlin Caitlin Caitlin my love my love, where are you and where am I and why haven’t you written and I love you’ — which is surely the romantic equivalent of: ‘You’re my besht mate, you are.’
Drunken poets, in fact, turn out to be a bit of a recurring theme, usually with their long-suffering girlfriends reaching the end of their tethers. ‘This is the depths and the final and the end of my misery and degradation,’ the Canadian author elizabeth Smart informs the married George Barker (shortly before returning to him). ‘I see no beauty in lopsided true love.’
Then again, there are a few drunken actors, too. After yet another of their break-ups, Richard Burton tells elizabeth Taylor: ‘I am a smashing bore and why you’ve stuck by me so long is an indication of your loyalty. I shall miss you with wild passion and regret.’
During her affair with Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich is wisely advised by noël Coward: ‘Stop wasting your time on someone who only really says
tender things to you when he’s drunk.’ A more unexpected boozer is Jane Austen, who, in 1800, admits: ‘I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne.’
Luckily, her hangover doesn’t prevent her from reminding us that, despite her sainted reputation, Austen was never above a spot of cheerful cattiness: ‘Mrs Blount appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, pink husband and fat neck...Miss Debary, Susan and Sally made their appearance, and I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.’
The book also contains its fair share of global history — including a terrifying description of conditions in the Crimea by Florence Nightingale and a possibly worldchanging letter from Hugh Dowding, the head of RAF Fighter Command, in May 1940. Rather than wasting any more planes trying to save France, Dowding advises Churchill that the RAF should keep them ready for when Britain might have ‘to carry on the war single-handed’.
And sometimes the history is what gives a letter its significance. A businessman complaining to his copper supplier about poor service mightn’t sound very interesting — except the man is doing it in 1750BC.
This book is beautifully produced, with several letters appearing in their handwritten form alongside the typeset version.
ADMITTeDLy, a few explanations of the more obscure references might have been helpful — but, strangely, the only persistent flaw is in Shaun Usher’s brief introductions to each entry, which often read like slightly rushed junior-school homework.
‘Michelangelo,’ we’re told, ‘was — and still is — one of the greatest artists ever to have walked the earth thanks to the numerous masterpieces to his name; his iconic sculptures, David and the Pieta, and the exquisitely painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to name but three.’
As for Austen, her ‘anonymously penned novels — Sense And Sensibility, Pride And Prejudice and emma, to name but three — have become required reading in many circles and are now held aloft as classics without reservation.’
But, seeing how good he is at choosing the letters, Usher could perhaps be forgiven worse crimes than that. So, here’s further proof of his selecting ability — and a couple more of the book’s gems that can be held aloft as classics without reservation.
The first, which has a strong claim to be the politest thank you letter ever written, was left by Winston Churchill for his jailers just before he escaped from a Boer prison in 1899. In it, he expresses the ‘wish, in leaving you thus hastily and unceremoniously, to once more place on record my appreciation of the kindness that has been shown me’.
The other will have teachers everywhere fantasising about one day receiving something similar. In 1957, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature — and immediately wrote to the man who’d taught him when he was nine.
‘Dear Monsieur Germain,’ wrote Camus. ‘Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of this would have happened.’
And all that without an emoticon in sight.