A Lost Art

Letters arriving in the mailbox are always a welcome treat, especially those that display themselves as the real thing, or at least real in the sense of being handwritten in fountain pen and ink and with a stamp that isn’t merely faint red lines from a postal meter. No doubt many people lament the fact that these mailbox surprises are growing rarer by the year. Truth is, I’m surprised much of the time that my local post office is able to get anything delivered in semi-accurate fashion. Last week my houseguest sent five postcards to Tokyo. Not knowing that it wasn’t necessary, he included a return address (mine) on the cards. The following Monday all five cards were delivered—postmarked—to my mailbox.

Apart from receiving ‘real’ letters from time to time, I also enjoy reading the published letters of writers and other people with a special talent for interesting communication. In the letters of someone like E.B. White, Dorothy Parker or John F. Kennedy we can almost sense through the published typescript that their thoughts and comments were originally brewed and steeped in pen and paper. It’s not usual that we find letter collections that include the writing of a wide range of diverse names and personalities. Easy enough to find individual collections, but an ‘anthology’ of letters from a long list of familiar names is more uncommon.

America 1900-1999: Letters of the Century is just such a book. Naming only a few on the list, this book includes the correspondence of James Baldwin, Clyde Barrow, George Bush, Truman Capote, Albert Einstein, Cher, George Washington Carver and Janis Joplin. Editors Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler have done a good job of compiling an ecletic view of American thought during the decades of twentieth century America.

One of my favorite letters was written by the author of the Uncle Remus stories, tales that gave us the indelible characters of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. On Thursday, April 5, 1900 Joel Chandler Harris wrote to his twenty-two year-old son Evelyn…

Dear Evelyn: Your letter was waiting for me when I came home, but was not the less interesting because I had seen you in the meantime. We usually say more in a letter than we do in conversation, the reason being that in a letter, we feel that we are shielded from the indifference or enthusiasm which our remarks may meet with or arouse. We commit our thoughts as it were, to the winds. Whereas, in conversation we are constantly watching or noting the effect of what we are saying, and when the relations are intimate, we shrink from being taken too seriously on one hand, and on the other not seriously enough. —But people no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and for the most part the ability, they dictate dispatches and scribble messages. When you are in the humor you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago, especially the letters of women. There is a charm about them impossible to describe, the charm of unconsciousness and the sweetness of real sincerity. But in these days we have not the artlessness nor the freedom of our forbears. We know too much about ourselves. Constraint covers us like a curtain. Not being very sure of our own feelings, we are in a fog about the feelings of others…

Poet, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an unusual man in that he pursued lifelong careers as both a businessman and as a poet. Until his death he was an executive of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and in the meantime winning one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards for his poetry. On March 21, 1907 he wrote to his future wife…

Dear Elsie—

I am so full of misery to-night that I am ridiculous. Every Spring I have a month or two of semi-blackness and perhaps the mood is just returning. Perhaps, it is simply a revulsion against old things—habits, people, places—everything: the feeling the sun must have, nowadays, when it shines on nothing but mud and bare trees and the general world, rusty with winter. People do not look well in Spring. They seem grimy and puffy and it makes me misanthropic. Spring fills me so full of dreams that try one’s patience in coming time. One has a desire for the air full of spice and odors, and for days like junk of changing colors, and for warmth and ease, and all other things that you know so well. But they come so slowly. Earth and the body and the spirit seem to change together, and so I feel muddy and bare and rusty.

…………………

Unrelated to anything but spring bloom is a photograph of my pet geranium, a small clump of leaves planted in the white urn about three months ago, and now….

Allusion

This morning I was reading in James Lee Burke’s novel, Pegasus Descending when I came upon a passage I recognized as an allusion, but one I couldn’t identify. Burke’s sentence was this: ‘Our appointment in Samarra is made for us without our consent, and Death finds us of its own accord and in its own time.’ Appointment in Samarra is the title of a 1934 John O’Hara novel, which uses as an epigraph an earlier story taken from Somerset Maugham. Burke’s line took on a clearer and richer meaning after reading a short synopsis of the old story — In Baghdad, a merchant sends his servant to the marketplace, but the servant soon returns pale and trembling, saying that he jostled a woman he recognized as Death, that she made a threatening gesture. He flees to Samarra, where he believes Death will not find him. Concerned abut his servant, the merchant goes to the marketplace, finds death and asks about her threatening gesture to his servant. She answers that her gesture was, on the contrary one of surprise at seeing the servant in Baghdad, and continuing…“Surprised because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

Not many many pages later Burke alludes to the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” when he writes, ‘But I still had miles to go before I slept,’ hinting at a similar complexity that had troubled the Frost character. Most fans of Burke will agree that his frequent use of allusion heightens the impact of his stories.

‘Allusion’ is a word we have taken from the Latin alussio meaning ‘to play with, to touch lightly upon,’ Most of us learned somewhere during high school or college that an allusion is a figure of speech that makes reference to, or representation of, a place, event, literary work, or work of art, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication.

Modern writers, for the most part, have pretty much abandoned the use of allusion in their writing, but a great many earlier writers (particularly the more classical) relied upon allusion to add depth and erudition to their writing. It was also a way to draw parallels in linking one writer’s thought to another, to broaden the basis of a position or argument. In modern terms the parenthesis to allusion might be something like, ‘the great so and so said the same thing, like this…’ Allusion was in fact a common tool for classical writers, and while its use among modern writers has declined, it certainly hasn’t disappeared, and we can still enjoy the extra richness it brings to our reading, fiction or otherwise.

Another recent example that sent me off to the reference desk comes from Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. In a section about one of his main characters, he writes… ‘In Hartford as a junior counsel he would walk along the narrow paths with Wallace Stevens, of all people, both men in sleeveless shirts. It did not give of bird or bush, like nothing else in Tennessee.’ I was confused by this sudden non-sequitur in italics, and so typed it into Google. The line comes from the Wallace Stevens poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” a rather difficult work to fathom, but somewhere in there is the idea of authority. By no means a Eureka! type of unveiling, but I did finally conclude that McCann’s use of the line was probably an allusion to the authority of his character’s position as a New York judge. Once again I felt as though the allusion had added some salt to the character, as well as to the story.

One last example is the history-making 1963 speech by Dr Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream,” a veritable gold mine of allusions to literature, song, drama, Bible and historical documents. At one point in his speech King alludes to Shakespeare’s Richard III in saying, ‘This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.’ In the final lines he calls up the words of a traditional African-American spiritual when he says, “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” knowing that the majority of his listeners will be able to quote with him the final words of his speech.

Frankly, Dr King’s speech would have been weakened without his powerful use of allusion.