Clandestine Communications: Letters between Friends

At the age of twenty-one I bought a cheap airline ticket and flew to London. I left behind the expectations of friends and family and an entrenched sense of duty. And I left behind a boyfriend—I’ll call him Dave—a fellow who was well past his use-by date.

It was a particularly cold winter that year in London. Ice formed around the cracks in the window-pane of my room and I needed to dress for bed. I rationed the coins I put in the gas meter for the heat, I rationed my baths because of the rationed coins—and also because a bath shared by several strangers is not an attractive proposition to a compulsive cleaner. I sat alone in my room at the top of the house and as the weeks passed, Dave, the main reason why I left Australia, came to occupy the centre of my life.

Within a month my letters to Dave had become a daily occurrence and the high point of an otherwise skimpy existence. I managed to write him into a perfect presence and myself into a love to rival young Werther’s. I wrote on Wedgwood-blue, onion-skin paper in a small and careful script. I loved the sponginess of the paper, the rise and fall of my pen riding the dimpled surface. Writing my letters was as physical as playing the piano, and sensual like Chopin or Scriabin or the second movement of the Pathétique. The more I wrote to Dave the less effort I made to meet people or find myself a proper job. By the end of the first month I had convinced myself that the main purpose of my London trip was not to further my career as a speech pathologist but to give myself time to write. So I instituted a tight budget and settled down to letter-writing and fiction. In retrospect they were much the same.

I wrote to Dave for hours every day, I wrote my feelings and most private of thoughts, I wrote my hopes and expectations. And as a 21-year-old idealist who desired nothing less than perfection, I wrote at length about my philosophy of life. And when I wasn’t writing I read books of great loves: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Women in Love, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. I read as many Iris Murdochs as I could find in the second-hand bookshops of Charing Cross Road and all five of Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest books. Passion marked the fully lived life and I was awash with passion as I sat alone in my room reading great books and writing my letters. I wrote myself into a passionate future with Dave where Life was writ large and bursting with books and our two gifted children and the sorts of discussions that I imagined Jean-Paul Sartre had with Simone de Beauvoir, and Martha Quest had with whomever was sitting around her breakfast table. When I put my pen down I would imagine these conversations, I would actually speak them aloud as I sat alone in my freezing room at the top of the house.

As it happened, while I was writing my way into an idealised future with Dave, he was having it off with his very real and present biochemistry partner. Such a betrayal would never have occurred to me. My Dave was, after all, my creation, the product of my imagination, and my imagination was in service to me. It had no interest in the real world, it had no interest in the real Dave. Dave was simply a cipher in the life I longed to have.

And that is how it might have remained except my imaginings were made public in letters which were dispatched day after day across the world to a man who, being otherwise engaged, probably did not even bother to read them. When I returned home Dave was as he had always been, pompous and arrogant, smelling of Clearasil and Aramis, and far more interested in himself and his biochemistry partner than in me and my passions.

Since the debacle of Dave, I have been wary of correspondence with lovers and would-be lovers. The lover’s imagination is a fool for romance. That personal, confidential and seductive first-person voice of letters—both one’s own and one’s beloved’s—is irresistible. And the letter-writing lover, so fastidious when it comes to removing the soiled bits of self, is never less than fascinating and adorable. When it comes to a lover relationship, reality does not stand a chance against the imaginative possession of letters.

How different it is with letters between friends. The self-serving monologue of the distant lover becomes a conversation in a letter to a friend. It is as if the feelings of the distant lover become concentrated and caught in the fact of separation, while the feelings of the distant friend are far more dispersed, encompassing new places and people, fears and delights, risks and discoveries, and accompanied by a desire to share. A friend does not have to convince of her desirability as a friend, but the lover, particularly the new lover is compelled to keep adding to her credentials. The friend being certain in the friendship can communicate and share, the lover whose position is a good deal more precarious has to show greater discretion. And the leisurely solitude of letter-writing so in thrall to the narcissism of the lover inspires the sort of reflection and intimacy that deepens real communication with a friend.

*

One of the two enduring correspondences of my life began in 1989 with a contemporary from my high school who moved permanently to London after matriculating. We were not particularly close at school. Only when I made contact with her many years later on a trip to London did our friendship begin, developed and enriched almost entirely by letters. F is a historian of the eighteenth century, a document scholar whose work takes her into the letters of the long-dead. When first I met her in London, apart from her struggles with British Rail—she lives in Kent and commutes daily—she might well have been living in the eighteenth century. The modern world was anathema to her and she preferred to let it pass her by. Consequently she was very thin—Sainsbury’s was too severe a challenge for someone better equipped to deal with Queen Anne’s kitchen.

I’d never known anyone like her. In her letters to me, long letters arriving every two to three weeks, she would write about her work, her views on human foibles, on the city and the countryside, on contemporary life. She had strong and critical opinions on everything from microwave ovens (‘Unnecessary and unnatural’), to sex (‘Sex is not a twentieth century invention; the English court could have taught Freud a thing or two’), and the increase of crime (‘We live in a fallen world’). She revealed an existence that was foreign and fascinating, and through her letters she invited me in.

My own world view seemed so prosaic when compared with hers, but through her letters she convinced me otherwise. I was her intimate friend, she wrote, the only one she had. She once told me she knew immediately when one of my letters had arrived. There would be the sound of the letter slat opening in her front door and the slap of letters falling to the floor. ‘Your letters fall with a unique sound,’ she said.

Our correspondence continues to this day, although it is experiencing marked fatigue. While the incessant groan of maturity demands the quiet reflection of letters more than ever, after work, family, friends, a smorgasbord of entertainment, regular exercise and the infinite attractions of cyberspace, there’s little time left for letters and even if there were, one is far too aroused for the calm, quiet stillness of letter-writing. Too often I resort to e-mail and cheap telephone calls—skype is out of the question given that F’s computer was purchased in the computer age’s equivalent of the eighteenth century. But it is not the same. Our letters gave us a special entry into the other’s life and thoughts, and much of the time I remained unaware of the ordinary vagaries of my friend’s days as she remained ignorant of mine. But phone and e-mail love the quotidian, and the kitchen-sink narrative manages to insert itself even when you try to keep it out. These days when we communicate, F and I skim the wide surface of our lives; rare is the deep lunge that used to characterise our letters. And the friendship has changed. And yet on those rare occasions when I do write her a proper letter, the sense of an intimate and unique connection comes rushing back.

The other enduring correspondence was with Andrea Stretton, who died suddenly and far too young in November 2007. Over a period of fifteen years Andrea and I exchanged letters, although not regularly as I have with F. We wrote when there was confusion or emotional upheaval such as those long months in 2001 when Andrea’s mother, Dulcie, and my father, Arthur, were seriously ill and dying. And Andrea, who knew so much more than I about the visual arts, would write to me about painters and sculptors. And often when stymied on my current novel I would write. Why might she want to read yet another novel that drew on the Holocaust? I once asked. And another time I wanted her views on novels peopled by strong and unlikeable characters. Andrea had an ancient wisdom and a staggeringly accurate intuition. Her letters would come to me, several pages of her large, neatly sprawling hand-writing hurtling to the end of the line. The writing would become more energetic as the letter progressed, as she, Andrea, welled up like ink through the nib of a pen.

And I always wrote to Andrea when a novel was finished. She was one of my first readers. I have just finished my new novel, Reunion, and the pleasure is not the same without her. Then there were our London letters. Both Andrea and I were unabashed Londonphiles. When Andrea launched my third novel I presented her with an illustrated book of London I had discovered in a second-hand bookshop. It carried the best marks of age—no vegemite or red wine stains, just a gentle dimming of the colours and print, a nice loosening of the binding, and the pepper and age smell of old paper. We both regarded it as a treasure. We loved London and whenever one of us was there we would write to the Andrea back home to include her in the wonders of the place. We always planned to enjoy London together one day. My own handwriting, although neat and even on the page, is difficult to read. I try to make it legible—I consider it an act of hostility to send hard-to-read handwriting to anyone but a sworn enemy. Andrea loved my letters—which I regarded as evidence that she loved me. She treated them like a long slow meal, she said, taking particular pleasure in deciphering the hard-to-read words.

During the brief illness that preceded her death, Andrea asked that friends of hers not living in Sydney write to her. I had flown to Africa just prior to her diagnosis and I arrived home the week after her death; I did not even know she was sick. But had I known I would have written her a letter that took us to London on the trip we never made, that had us walking the Bloomsbury streets together, searching out the blue plaques on the houses of our favourite writers and thinkers, having a sandwich lunch in the garden squares where Virginia and Leonard walked their dogs. I would have written us strolling through Regent’s Park and Kew Gardens, and tramping across the heath to Keats’ house to read ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ under the plum tree in the garden—not the same tree under which he composed the poem, but a very good likeness. And off to the Courtauld to view our favourite Kokoschkas, then to the NPG and the National Gallery, and a day wandering through the smaller galleries in Soho. And to the theatre in the West End, and other productions in hard-to-find locations and later the two of us standing on the platform of an otherwise deserted tube station talking, always talking while we waited for the last train to whisk us home. I would have written us at concerts at the Barbican and the Victoria and Albert Hall and a special exhibition of bibliophilia at the London Library. In my last letter to Andrea we would have made the trip to London we had always promised ourselves.

*

Writing letters is a means of discovery. Writing letters is always a writing down into the self at the same time as it is a writing to the outer other.

Writing letters is to oppose forgetting. You write into memory, stamp and engrave it, and then send it to someone else for acknowledgement and safe keeping. Every letter reminds: I am alive.

Writing letters is intimate, just between me and you. And hand-writing—always idiosyncratic, spontaneous, the personal and revealing finger-prints of a valued friend. Every letter proclaims: I appreciate you.

And letters with their resonant first-person perspective are authoritative. Saul Bellow begins his great novel Herzog with Moses Herzog alone in the countryside deserted by his second wife who has run off with his best friend. Herzog is wallowing in squalor and writing letters to people known and unknown, from dear dead Mama to dear living Mr President: Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of book-keepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man’s life is not a business.

Herzog is telling the president how it is. Herzog is all-powerful in his letters while the rest of his life is running amok. He is writing letters as a means of convincing himself he is not wasting his life. He is writing letters in order to avoid taking other more difficult but ultimately more constructive action. He is writing letters while time rolls forward without him. In this sense his letters are not unlike those I wrote to Dave.

*

Life hurtles along with work, family, friends, meals, travel, movies, concerts, the theatre, a rally in Fed Square. Texting, e-mail, blogging, telephoning and on-line chat fit so much better with the hectic pace of contemporary life than the long, slow absorption of letter-writing. These days if people want to plunge deeply into the self they go to a therapist; as for plunging deeply into another, in an ethos where the immediate gratification of self dominates, this is not a common desire. Rather than fill an hour or two with writing a letter, we would prefer to fit three or four activities into the available time. Letter-writing conjures up processes such as stewing, fermenting and brewing, and a languid and mellow atmosphere. Letter-writing is communication’s equivalent of ‘slow cooking’ and few see the point of it any more.

As letter-writing is confined to the storehouse of history along with illuminated manuscripts and sewing by hand, more is lost than the actual physical object. A way to deeper self-knowledge, an occasion to rummage around in the imagination, an opportunity to refine thoughts and ideas, and a way of privately and significantly connecting with someone else. I don’t want to give up e-mail or texting or the telephone, but I want the full immersion of letter-writing as well.

And I want to go to the letterbox and find among the mail an envelope with my name and address in a hand-writing I recognise. I want to see the familiar scrawl of sender details on the back flap, to feel the squish of several sheets of paper, to acknowledge that thump of anticipation as I walk inside. I want the lovely ritual of withdrawing to a comfy chair with a fresh mug of coffee and my letter, reading through at first quickly and then more slowly, savouring the burn of just me with my friend and nothing to intrude on our clandestine and highly charged tryst. And later slipping the letter into my wallet so that as I ride the tram and shop for dinner and attend meetings, I feel through the presence of the letter the real presence of my absent friend.

And I want the pleasure of responding, when alone with my own thoughts and with no barriers to imagination, to memory, to secret hopes and pungent yearnings a voice from my own deep consciousness becomes ever more audible. An hour or two with no-one looking over my shoulder, no-one to restrain my arm as it moves across the page, nothing and no-one to temper my thoughts and desires as I communicate to another person in that intimate and confidential way which is the special province of letters, and in that act letting them know they matter even though they are far from my everyday life.

*

In the latter part of the nineteenth century in the port of Shanghai a man boarded a boat bound for California. He carried with him a valise of hand-written letters. He was an amanuensis. For several months he had visited the homes of people whose relatives had emigrated to America. While he transcribed, brothers and fathers and sisters and mothers told their stories and revealed their private thoughts and vented their love and loneliness. Months later, in homes across the state of California he read the letters aloud to homesick Chinese families. He would answer their questions and transcribe their replies and later, with his valise again full, he would board the ship for China. This guardian of letters, a true memory-keeper, travelled back and forth between Shanghai and San Francisco several times over two decades. Each round trip took about a year.