Critical Survey

When I was a child I remember being fascinated by a bundle of very old letters which my grandmother kept at the back of her writing desk, tied together with a piece of faded ribbon. The letters were still in their respective envelopes; some had stamps bearing Queen Victoria’s head – Penny Blacks and Reds – which I marvelled at, for these were collectors’ items already in the 1950s, or so my older sister informed me. The envelopes were addressed in different styles of copperplate handwriting in blue or black ink which had sometimes spitted a careless blot or two randomly across the neatly etched script. Inside, curling characters scrolled across the folded pages, which occasionally enclosed a small memento: a sepia photograph or a pressed flower – a violet still faintly blue. The writing itself seemed to speak volumes to a small child who was still painstakingly learning to form her own characters at school; but the letters were far more than mere handwriting to be deciphered and interpreted. For me, as for my grandmother, these were distinct voices from the past. And in their different rhythms of speech, forms of expression and often oldfashioned vocabulary, these individual letter-writers seemed to momentarily live again when their words were reiterated.

When A.C. Bradley came to write about King Lear in his book on Shakespeare’s tragedies, what annoyed him most about the play was what he considered the patently absurd fact that Edgar is supposed to have written Edmund a letter when they were both living in the same castle. That Edmund should have pretended anything so asinine, and, worse still, that Gloucester should have believed it, both seemed to Bradley utterly beyond belief. Approaches to reading Shakespeare’s plays have of course moved on in leaps and bounds in the days since Bradley, but, even so, I want to argue that we may still miss some of the meanings of the very frequent use of letters in Renaissance plays, and particularly those in Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. Letters sprinkle the drama in extraordinary abundance – the word ‘letter’ occurs thirty-three times in King Lear alone – and often occur at moments of particularly heightened significance, as when Lady Macbeth in her sleep repeatedly writes and seals a letter which neither we nor the characters ever discover the contents of. They frequently serve a vital role in plot development, particularly in the uncovering of hidden truths, and occasionally, as when Edmund makes such an issue of ostensibly wanting to conceal the supposed letter from Edgar about his person, they become in themselves significant dramatic properties in ways which seem almost to foreshadow Pamela and Clarissa. What I want to focus on here, though, is not so much the plot function of the letter as its rôle as discourse, and, in particular, its tonal and status relationship to other kinds of discourse in the drama.

It was ten and a half months later that the truth was learned; but on the afternoon of the 10th of February 1913 a telegram reached London from New Zealand to say that Captain Scott and the four members of his assault party had all died on their return from the South Pole, prevented by blizzards from reaching the stores that were, tantalisingly, a mere eleven miles away. The bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers still lay just as they had lain at the end of the previous March, when they had died; and with them were Scott’s journal and unsent letters which would bring the story home to the British public in all its unforgettable drama. Extracts from the journal were published the following day in The Times, and the following paragraph in particular was reprinted again and again: ‘I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardship, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks – we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last’. The story of Captain Oates too, whose body had not been found, was told again and again, and his last words would become famous: ‘I am just going outside and I may be gone some time’. To sacrifice his own life so that the other members of his party might have the chance to reach safety was, in Scott’s own words, ‘the act of a brave man and an English gentleman’. The events were terrible enough; but it was the journal that gave them their air of tragedy.

Eugénie de Guérin was born in 1805 and died in 1848 in the isolated Château du Cayla in the department of the Tarn, in South West France. She was the first girl in a family of four children. Having lost her mother at the age of fourteen years, she was given responsibility for the upbringing of her younger brother, Maurice. She later refused three or even four proposals of marriage, so determined was she to keep her promise to her dying mother that she would care for Maurice and for the whole family. At the age of twenty-nine years, separated from her brother, who was living in Paris, and anxious about his spiritual welfare, she began writing a series of long and secret letters to him to guide him in his religious walk. At the same time as she was sending him secret letters via his friends, she was also sending him more public ones to be read out aloud to the cousins with whom he was lodging. Extracts from these intimate letters, entitled Reliquiae were published in France in 1855, seven years after her death. The publication met with tremendous success, possibly due to the rather unusual distribution of the limited number of fifty copies of the Reliquiae. These were given or sent to extremely well-known contemporary writers, such as Baudelaire, in the hope that this would lead to a great demand for the later publication of the whole journal. Indeed, such expectations were well met, for twelve out of a maximum of sixteen of her letter-booklets were published as the Journal d’Eugénie de Guérin in 1862 by G.S. Trébutien and Jules Barbey d ’ Aurevilly and reached eight editions only sixteen months after publication. By 1866, four years later, there were twelve editions, thirty by 1877, fifty-nine by 1929, but as her popularity slowed down, only 60 by 1977 and 61 by 2001.

Some time around 1710 Pope sent his female friend, Miss Blount, a small present, a book: ‘the Works of Voiture’. Vincent de Vo i t u r e , whose life (1598 – 1648) occupied the first half of the seventeenth century, was a poet, but he was celebrated more particularly as the author of correspondence (his Lettres were published posthumously in 1650), which distilled the moral and stylistic qualities of the aristocratic French culture of his age. Pope accompanied his gift to Martha Blount with a letter, or more properly an ‘Epistle’ as it was called in its title when it was published in Lintot’s Miscellany in 1712. The root meaning of ‘epistle’ is clear in its origin in the Greek verb ‘stellein’, to send, and the prefix ‘epi’, on the occasion of. An epistle was a missive for a particular occasion, the little occasion in this case being the present of the book. The concept of the epistle links the written word to the world of living, and this is underlined in Pope’s verse epistle by his making his first theme the extent to wh i c h Voiture’s life was expressed in his text: ‘…all the Writer lives in ev’ry Line’.

Literary history might identify the 1990s as the decade of the memoir, as a period that witnessed a prodigious outpouring of sombre narratives of grim beginnings overcome in individual triumphs, or of scandalous escapades intimately exposed. However entertaining or shocking, few will be memorable, their highly personal recollections remaining pertinent to the lives of the authors alone. Publishing successes are often due to word of mouth recommendations as, for example, in the recent success of Lorna Sage’s excellent autobiography Bad Blood. Even in such cases we can claim that the writing is, as it were, consumed in a quiet way where its charms are celebrated in a low level, personalised propaganda which eventually leads to a more public recognition. Reviewers and publicity machines can play their part in the success of a book but we seldom find a situation where readers’ written responses amount to a collective and influential embrace which propels a publication into further public prominence.

The Invisible Man GRAHAM HOLDERNESS

On Lake Oscanawa American Sound SUE DYMOKE

Back Home … SIMON CURTIS

Battle Training MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Mandatory Post-Colonial Poem STUART FLYNN

Only Resting Trading Up RENNIE PARKER

Cutting the Bay Hedge LAWRENCE SAIL

Gladsongs and Gatherings edited by Stephen Wade (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001) ISBN 0 85323 727 1 £13.95

So by Steven Blyth (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 2001) ISBN 1871471892 £7.95

The Basics by Stuart Pickford (Bradford: Redbeck, 2001) ISBN 0946980 84 5 £6.95

A Different Kind of Smoke by Keith Chandler (Bradford: Redbeck, 2001) ISBN 0946980 81 0 £5.95

Looking in All Directions – Selected Poems 1954–2000 by Peter Kane Dufault (Tonbridge: Worple, 2000) ISBN 0953094758 £10.00

Passage from Home – A Memoir by Philip Callow (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2001) ISBN 189954965X £6.99

The Echoing Green by Gladys Mary Coles (Hexham: Flambard, 2001) ISBN 1873226489 £7.50

Letting Loose the Hounds by Martin Hayes (Frizinghall: Redbeck, 2001) ISBN 0099591316 £5.95

The Old Campaigners by George Jowett (Frizinghall: Redbeck, 2001) ISBN 09469809X £3.95

St. Cuthbert and Bystanders by Chris Considine (Frizinghall: Redbeck, 2001) ISBN 0946980802 £3.95

Sailing to Hokkaido by Joseph Woods (Tonbridge: Worple, 2001) ISBN 0953094766 £6.00

Tony Harrison and the Holocaust by Antony Rowland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001) ISBN 0 85323 516 3 £9.99

Getting There by Matt Simpson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001) 0 85323 957 6 £8.95

Notes on contributors