Drink and dissipation--it is, after all, Monday

This week finds me still pressed enough by responsibilities that blogging will once again be light and unreliable. That situation seems likely to obtain until late July, at which point I hope to be back in form.

For today, I'll offer another quick dip into Penelope Fitzgerald's volume of letters, So I Have Thought of You. To her friend Hugh Lee, Fitzgerald, not quite twenty-four, wrote on November 13, 1940,

I hear Oxford is violently gay and in general suggests those bits in comedy films where you see champagne glasses superimposed on merry-go-rounds to suggest dissipation, so when I come up I do hope you will be able to show me some of it.

That image of drunken debauchery returned to my mind this morning when I was flipping through Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing and got to the section on drinking. In a paragraph rich with interpolated quotations that make for my favorite type of history writing, White writes,

Drink played a large part in the culture of every rank in eighteenth-century London. James Boswell's drinking bouts, for instance, faithfully but shamefacedly recorded in his diaries, might make a slim volume on their own. At the chaplain's table at St James's Palace in December 1793, "that exquisite wine" champagne confined to France by the wartime blockade, the company had to make do with "madeira, sherry, hock, port, and claret, and good malt liquor; and I took enough to warm me rather too much." "Madeira, sherry port, old hock circulated" at a private dinner given by a vintner two or three months later, "and we had a glass both of burgundy and champagne. And lastly came an elegant dessert and Scotch pints of very capital claret"--a Scotch pint some three times larger than the English variety: "The generous bottle circulated so as to produce in my a total oblivion till I found myself safe in my own bed next morning. "Even his twelve-year-old son Jamie, at Westminster School, was forced by the scholars "to drink burgundy until he was intoxicated." When John Yeoman, a Somerset dairy farmer and potter, spent a night in London on a visit in 1774, "we made to free with the Duce of the Vine. Mr. Forrester Was quite full, went home to his house Where he was so Sick that it flew out att both ends like a Bedlamite."

Some points:

1. Yes, please, to the one-volume edition of Boswell's indulgences and hangovers!

2. A Scotch pint is more than 48 ounces? Good god, no wonder Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo and Crawford of Lymond were such champion drinkers.

3. I did not know that among the stereotypical characteristics of inhabitants of Bedlam was dual evacuation. Ew.

Crossing the ocean, White quotes Ben Franklin, "a water drinker," who tells of his fellows at the printing house in which he worked as a young man:

We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's work.

As someone who usually regrets a second martini and always regrets--and thus nearly always avoids--a third, I am consistently astonished by the quantities put back by drinkers past. And it's not only the far distant--read the Johns O'Hara or Cheever, or Dashiell Hammett and attend to the drinking, and it's hard not to become queasy. To bastardize L. P. Hartley: the soaks of the past, they were another country.

I'll close with another line I happened to read today, from Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical novel My Struggle:

[W]e went out almost every night, and on one of the nights, I can remember [my older brother] Yngve was surprised but also proud that I could drink five bottles of wine and still more or less behave.

I'm guessing that "more or less" is doing quite a bit of work there. And it's important, for a full visual picture of the drunken teen, to know that this was Norway in 1985 or so and the prevailing style was punk-influenced new wave. Oh, and the novel is largely about how Knausgaard's father drank himself to death and how Knausgaard coped with that. As everyone from the Gin Lane reformers to the WCTU would tell you, there are consequences.

"So many potty ladies, so many biographies!"

I wrote quite a bit about So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald when it was published in England in 2008, so I was pleased to discover today that it finally reached America officially last month, being published in paperback by Fourth Estate.

I wrote about the book for the Constant Conversation tonight, but no volume of letters worth its salt is ever exhausted, so I've got a couple of additional bits to share here.

First, this paragraph from a letter Fitzgerald sent to Colin Haycraft, her editor at Duckworth, on April 11, 1978, when she was in the midst of her ultimately unsuccessful attempt to write a biography of L. P. Hartley:

I did succeed in getting invited to LPH's childhood home, unchanged since 1900, with the old brass electric light fittings and baths &c., and by talking to his sister I got the psychological key to his novels, every novelist has one, I suppose, the situation his mind goes back to when he's alone--and I also discovered that his manservant was trying to poison him with veronal and that was why his bank manager locked him up and forced him to make a will, not in the manservant's favour--I was surprised when Frabcus [King, her friend] commented on this, that surely anyone would prefer to be murdered by someone they loved, rather than have them leave and blackmail you--these seemed to him the only alternatives, but I can think of so many other duller ones.

Good god, can I ever!

Then there's this line from a note she sent her editor, Richard Ollard, after a domestic accident that sent her to the emergency room:

The next case brought in after me was an O/D-M/D--overdose, marital disagreement.

DSo I Have Thought of You is so full of pleasures that no one who has fallen for Fitzgerald's brilliantly lean, piercingly perceptive novels should be without it.

Getting lost in October Country

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Every October, I do my best to spend at least some time reading stories of ghosts, haints, fetches, ghouls, and other unpleasant manifestations. This October has, sadly, found me too busy to get very far in that project, so that all I have to share right now is a bit from a letter from Penelope Fitzgerald to her editor Mandy Kirkby of May 19, 1995, collected in the wonderful So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald:

The ghost at the Southwold-Walberswick crossing is said to be a mother waiting for her child who was supposed to be coming back on the last ferry. The white dog, which I have actually seen, was something to do with Dunwich, I think, and the poltergeist was horrid.

This is one of those occasions that makes one wish that collections of letters as a matter of course incorporated both sides of the correspondence. What did Kirkby ask to elicit this response? Readers of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop will recognize the poltergeist (and not be surprised that the ghost in the novel, convincingly eerie, was drawn from life), while the ferry ghost seems pretty straightforward--but what was the white dog? And what were the circumstances of Fitzgerald's sighting of it? I've written before about a certain matter-of-factness the English seem to bring to relations the appearance of the presumably ghostly, and this seems a perfect example.

But for those intrepid readers who are not English, and who refuse to simply accept intrusions from the unlikely spirit world as commonplace, that little taste of ghostliness will surely not be enough. Fortunately, prompted by Maud Newton, James Hynes has put together a list of ten great scary stories at his blog. The ones I already know are frightening and uncanny enough that later this week I'll be making the effort to seek out the rest.

And if that list doesn't include enough scares for you, you're welcome to dip into the I've Been Reading Lately archives and enjoy my numerous ghost-and-goblin posts from last October. Or you can simply reflect at length on various Sarah Palin-as-President scenarios . . .

Five postscripts

This is the point where, back in an earlier century, I would have turned the letter on its side and begun writing across what was already there. Fortunately for your sanity, technology has saved you from having to read the enormity that would be the result of such a technique employed in my hideous handwriting.

1 In writing about So I Have Thought of You, the new collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters, I can't believe that I forgot to mention why a good portion of the letters from the first half or so of her life are missing: they were in her houseboat, Grace, when it sank in the Thames. Fans of her Booker Prize-winning Offshore (1979), a novel about an eccentric community of houseboat owners struggling to survive on the muddy banks of the Thames, may not be surprised--at least until they learn that this was the second time Grace sank. Once, for most of us, would have been enough.

2 Maud Newton and I corresponded off and on over several weeks recently about the possible fate of Iris Murdoch's letters, with me worrying that Murdoch's innate secretiveness surely meant that she was a burner of letters. But it took Jenny Davidson to suggest that the answer might be on my bookshelves: demonstrating yet again that she's a scholar while I'm just a dilettante, she pointed out that Peter Conradi, in his Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), probably at least mentions whether he had recourse to her letters. The resulting list tidbits about the topic, which I fired off in an e-mail to Jenny and Maud, is now part of a post at Maud's site. Short answer: there was probably some serious burning.

3 To close my post Wednesday about Sybille Bedford' s A Legacy, I drew on some praise for the book that Nancy Mitford included in a letter to Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, on the other hand, though he "read it straight through with intense pleasure," disagrees with me about its second half being the richer portion:

For the first half--up to the marriage of Jules & Melanie--I was in full agreement '"one of the best novels I ever read" as you say. After that I found a slight falling off, as though the writer had suddenly taken a stiff dose of Henry James, particularly in the long talks between Sarah & Caroline. Also I think it was clumsy to have any of the narrative in the first person. The daughter relates things she cannot possibly ever have known as though she were an eye witness. But these are small blemishes. What a brilliant plot!

Later in the letter, he, ponders, tongue in cheek, on the identity of the book's author:

I wondered for a time who this brilliant "Mrs Bedford" could be. A cosmopolitan military man, plainly, with knowledge of parliamentary government, and popular journalism, a dislike for Prussians, a liking for Jews, a belief that everyone speaks French in the home . . .

4 In her introduction to the 1999 Counterpoint edition of A Legacy, Bedford notes that the book was less than a success on publication, though Waugh gave it a strong review in the Spectator. "Such reception as it had was mostly bewildered or hostile or both." Even her publisher was less than fully committed to the book, though for extra-literary reasons:

George Weidenfeld was in the midst of troubles of his own--wives and Cyril Connolly--he gave me lunch at the Ritz on a bad day for him and was openly sad.

From Jeremy Lewis's Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997) we learn that this was the period when Weidenfeld, his marriage having collapsed, was busy diving into an affair with Connolly's wife, Barbara Skelton.

It began, Skelton claims, when Connolly himself told her that, as he had fallen for Lucien Freud's wife, Caroline Blackwood (who wanted nothing to do with him), he wouldn't mind her finding "a rival attraction of her own . . . provided he was a gentleman." It didn't take long: accidentally brushing hands at the theatre, Weidenfeld and Skelton "were suddenly aware of an intense and mutual physical attraction"; things proceeded apace, with childishness, misbehavior, and hideous scenes on all sides. Evelyn Waugh, rarely inclined to be generous about another's troubles, complained that

Connolly's cuckolding is a great bore. I dined with him and he went on and on.

Connolly's mother, on the other hand, was more vitriolically understanding, opening her argument with the unintentionally ridiculous line,

I think it is the last straw that it should it be your publisher. . . . I think a lioness would have repaid you more [than Barbara has]--animals have not spite and deliberate cruelty. . . . [P]ut her out of your mind and leave her to her present keeper.

Divorce ensued, followed by a quick marriage between Skelton and Weidenfeld that the bridegroom described as "a dismal affair, more like a wake than a wedding." The marriage itself was as brief and unpleasant as the affair had been long and passionate:

Life as a publisher's wife proved entirely uncongenial to Barbara. She claimed that she hated being woken every morning to the rustle of newspapers, was bored by Wiedenfeld's business talk and tireless ambition, and refused to play the part of the compliant, charming publishing hostess, despite his begging her to "Gush! Gush! You must be more gushing!"

It's not hard to see why Anthony Powell fixed on Skelton as the model for Pamela Widmerpool, isn't it? Skelton wrote two volumes of memoir, which I'm beginning to think I need to read.

5 This final item doesn't quite qualify as a true postscript, as I haven't really written about Cyril Connolly in recent weeks, but as he's a topic that's perpetually bubbling under the surface in these parts, you can consider it a postscript to I've Been Reading Lately in general. From his journal for 1931, a few lines for a city summer:

London now completely summer. Trees, tawdriness spreading west from Tottenham Court Road, evening pavements crowded with aimless sex. V. Woolf asked Elizabeth what unnatural vice was--"I mean what do they do?"

And that's all for tonight, for I find myself once again, as Connolly jotted down elsewhere in his journal, "Proust-ridden." The Prisoner calls.

"I cannot deny there is much repetition," or, Letters Week, Part VI!

From Canto XXI of The Beauty of the Husband (2001), by Anne Carson

To say what letters contain is impossible. Did you ever touch your tongue to a metal surface in winter--how it felt to not get a letter is easier to say.

In a comment to a post from earlier this week, Warren Hynes wrote,

Makes you wonder how much we're losing in our own chronicle of the modern day now that so many of us choose e-mails over old-fashioned letters. I can't imagine someday reading "The Collected E-mails of Dave Eggers."

It's a thought that's inescapable if you spend enough of your time reading letters collections: what have we lost with the decline of the letter? To take a simple example, So I Have Thought of You, the new volume of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters that I wrote about yesterday, is rich with business letters, notes to her editors and agents and publishers about various details regarding the publication of her books. Working in publishing, I find them fascinating--they offer a certain pleasant element of, "So that is how they used to do this!" And there's the occasional straight-up gem that originates in a work letter, like this one to Fitzgerald's publisher at Duckworth, Colin Haycraft:

I am in hopeless trouble (as usual) with all my Georgian permissions. Except for yourself, everyone who has to deal with them becomes maniacal, secretive, suspicious, very old or very ill. I'd no idea there would be such trouble.

Such communication does continue in today's offices via e-mail. But if my own e-mail archive is any indication, business e-mails in general attempt to make up in volume what they lack in clarity or lasting interest; if editing a chaotic trove of letters is a largely thankless task, then editing a lifetime of business e-mails would surely be resemble diabolic punishment.

It's the lost personal letters that are more pang-worthy, of course: what resources for understanding (or wickedly gossiping about) today's authors have we lost to the ephemerality of cell phones? At least The Collected E-mails of Dave Eggers is conceivable. The Collected Cell Phone Calls of Dave Eggers, with a New Appendix of Dropped Calls is a book only shelvable in the Imaginary Library.

I do still write letters fairly regularly, though more from of a dislike of the telephone than out of concern for posterity, the very thought that someone might want to someday collect my letters being ludicrous. (And, I have to confess, were it not ludicrous, the thought would almost instantly send me--despite all my complaints about destructive authors--matches in hand, to the nearest trash barrel.) I've maintained reasonably reliable paper correspondences with a couple of friends for nearly fifteen years, as we've lived in different cities or even countries.

That leads me to today's letter, with which I'll close Letters Week: in part because of our years-long correspondence, for Christmas this year I gave my friend Maggie Bandur a copy of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), whose 1,536 pages reign over the form of the epistolary novel. Knowing that Clarissa has its fans (including Jenny Davidson), I gave it in all kindness--but I will admit to being unsurprised when the cynical and worldly Ms. Bandur assumed I had given it as a cruel dare, an unspoken challenge to her honor. Refusing to take umbrage at her impugning of my intentions, I pleased myself instead with the knowledge that her misconception meant she would plow through the book with unstoppable determination.

Which she did. The result was a letter, received Friday, from which I draw the excerpts below:

My Dear Mister Stahl,
I hope you will excuse the familiarity of my addres, but I know not how else to express my boundless gratitude for the gift of the most virtuous, but most ill-used Clarissa. What a noble creature! What an excellent moral leson! Alas, for me, it has come too late. But what are the sorrows and disappointments of this earth, compared to the comfort of being held in our Father's bosom for eternity? And believe me, I now know what eternity feels like.

In truth, I must confess the book is exceedingly long. . . . Although Clarissa longs for escape from this mean existence and her meaner troubles, she learns, "Death from grief was the slowest of deaths." Cowars and villains expire in one epistle; a saint of nineteen requires 1,300 pages.

In answer to your question if it is worth reading, yes, yes, a million times yes. Put aside all other pursuits and pick up--nay, heft, this volume, eyesight and back problems be d----d! I know this is not womanly speech; you must excuse the violence of my passions. How can anyone not love this most exemplary of women? . . .

The book is full of beautiful language, charming observations of human nature, and an excess of moralizing. . . . . I would not say I didn't enjoy the book, but there is so, so much of it. The moments of intense action come as a surprise. I cannot imagine that even in simpler times, people were desirous of such a very long, complete, and earnest lesson. I was not unhappy while reading, but I cannot deny it has been an albatross around my neck. . . . I read nine other books while working my way through this one, and I'm haunted by what I could have read instead. Three Dickens! The entire works of Graham Greene! And surely there is a paradox, that one can write a book so improving to the spirit and yet leave young people absolutely no time to pick up a Bible.

Richardson's conclusion warns against happy endings. For virtue to always be rewarded and evil always to be punished in literature creates an unreasonable expectation in the reader. Life is not fair, and we must be prepared for such. All the justice is in the hearafter. I do confess I yearn for the order I've seen only in art. Like punishments for those who give presents that can be seen only as a dare.

Ah, but you know my prideful ways as well as anyone. What are months of study and a new eyeglass prescription compared to the bragging rights I've acquired?

So thank you, dear sir. I am much improved in mind and spirit since last we met, although I remain,

Your humble servant,
Maggie Bandur

Ah, but Maggie, think of all the fun you can have once you get to the afterlife slagging on the book with Henry Fielding! Isn't that alone worth your investment of time?

As for me, well, as I'm sure my letters over the coming months will reveal, I'm busy developing a serious dread of next Christmas.

"The sale of letters is a strange thing, though, a very different matter, it seems to me, from books," or, Letters Week Part V!

What set me paging through my various collections of letters this week were the reviews heralding the publication in England of So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald--whose collection of essays and reviews, The Afterlife (2003), was the subject of my first published review, in the Bloomsbury Review--has long been a favorite, her concise and moving novels a forceful reminder of the power of leaving out; now that I have the volume of her letters in hand, I'm pleased to find that the intelligence, gently ironic humor, and deep sympathy that mark her novels are in evidence in her correspondence as well.

I've only spent a couple of hours with the book so far, but I've already found much that's worth sharing. As I do with any book related to twentieth-century literary culture, I started with the index: Powell, Anthony. Powell does turn up, playing an unexpectedly heroic role, in a letter that is most likely from 1979 (Note to young writers: always include the year on your letters!) to novelist Francis King. At the time King was helping Fitzgerald research a biography of novelist L. P. Hartley, but Hartley's great love, Lord David Cecil, was stymieing her; she wrote,

My LPH situation has got better and worse, (in a way) as Anthony Powell, whom I went to see, rang up Lord David, out of pure kindness of heart, and told him to come off it, as Leslie's biography was sure to be written some time.

Powell's entreaty--delivered in perfectly Powellian fashion, relying equally on old-chap camaraderie and the inevitability posed by time's relentlessness--worked, as Lord David wrote Fitzgerald to say that he had "withdrawn all objections." Sadly, he soon adduced new ones, and the biography was never finished; our loss and Hartley's both, one has to believe, as Fitzgerald was a talented, perceptive, and kind biographer. She argued for the value of her approach in another letter to King:

A primary biography by people who know the subject and are really fond of him or her is a protection, I think. Perhaps artists should be judged by their work, but it's only too evident that they aren't.

That sympathy was where Fitzgerald rooted herself as a biographer; as she explained, first in a letter to her friend Hugh Lee in 1978, then again in more polished form to her American editor Chris Carduff in 1987,

[O]n the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Fitzgerald frequently returned in her letters to the myriad difficulties facing a biographer. Here, for example, in a letter to her publisher Colin Haycraft, dated October 12, 1978, she noted early problems getting needed information about Hartley:

I asked for information about Leslie Hartley in the TLS and got a number of replies, some referring discreetly to the drink problem--one of my difficulties however is that the only person I can find who was actually at Harrow with Leslie (in 1910) is Paul Bloomfield, who is at the same time much too easy and much too difficult to deal with, and also I wonder how much longer he'll last?

I particularly enjoy that letter because, though Fitzgerald is writing it from the perspective of a biographer, the line about Bloomfield--who is simultaneously too easy and too difficult--is the thought of a novelist, marveling at layers of complexity. A similar tone inflects a line from a letter to writer Harvey Pitcher, whom she was attempting to buck up about a biography he was struggling with:

What is odd is that the people concerned, it seems, both did, and didn't, want to conceal everything.

In another letter to Pitcher, from 1988, she succinctly defended the biographer's art, while addressing the question--inescapable for fans of the form--of the lasting emotional effect of digging so deeply into another's life:

I was surprised, though, at what you said about biography. It seems to me that (particularly if you have the letters, and if you knew the subject yourself or can get hold of someone who knew the subject) you can know him or her at least as well as anyone you meet in real life. The trouble is that it's rather difficult to shake the people off when the book is written, and return to yourself. They're not to be got rid of so easily.

Fitzgerald's biographical endeavors also caused her to be particularly attentive to the fates of letters. Still wrestling with the Hartley problem, she wrote to King on June 2, 1978 that, unfair though it may be, she's sure that a new, revealing biography of Edith Sitwell will frighten friends and relations of Hartley into reticence, and

I'm sure going to upset Norah very much and cause more wholesale destruction of letters &c. Well,--"publishing scoundrels!"

Of an earlier biographical subject, the poet Charlotte Mew, she wrote to Forster scholar Mary Lago in 1994,

I never did manage to find the crucial letters or information, although I'm sure they exist; Professor Friedmann said to me--"if there's no proof that a letter's been burned, it must exist somewhere.

Alas, I fear that Professor Friedman is overly optimistic, time and chaos being the fiends they pride themselves on being.

I'll close with a line that made me break out in a broad smile, from a letter of November 20, 1980 to her editor Richard Ollard:

It would be better to write long novels and short letters.

No fan of Fitzgerald's novels could wish that she'd taken her advice seriously; now that I've gotten a chance to enjoy her letters, I'm doubly glad.