Reading an author’s letters is often an unsatisfying experience. There are the inevitable frustrations and longueurs: time gaps, important events overlooked or hastily summoned. Marriages come and go in a page or two, and the next entry may be devoted to translation rights and the chicken circuit, to where the author read and what he ate afterward. Yet reading a correspondence can occasion feelings of kinship with a writer stronger than those brought on by a novel or poem. When you’re young, letters carry an extra force of revelation, since it is always consoling to learn that geniuses suffer doubt and depression, and nurse unruly appetites. At my college library, “Selected Letters of James Joyce” opened straight to December, 1909, when it was pulled from the shelves, drawing your eyes to a first-rate collection of smut. “The two parts of your body which do dirty things are the loveliest to me,” Joyce writes to Nora Barnacle. “I prefer your arse, darling, to your bubbies…” and on it goes. For many of my classmates, these letters were the only texts by Joyce they were ever able to finish.
Cardinal Newman believed that the core of a person was revealed in their correspondence. “For arriving at the inside of things,” he says, “the publication of letters is the true method.” This is certainly true of explorers, generals, heads of state, and of those who moved in the public sphere and left few other traces of their habits of mind. But with writers, getting at the inside of things feels like a process of reduction. We read the correspondence, return to the poems, and suddenly a line or stanza that gestures toward universals is a local matter. Equipped with biographical data, the work can be unzipped, but sometimes what spills out is effluvia, cliché, and little else.
These thoughts are prompted by the publication of “The Letters of William Gaddis,” and by the announcement that a selection of Willa Cather’s correspondence will be released later this month. Some authors are at peace with the idea that their mail might one day be out in the open. “When the worms have gotten after me I really don’t care too much whether anything I wrote in a letter is revealed,” remarked William Styron, another novelist whose correspondence was recently posthumously published. But Gaddis and Cather do not fall into that camp. Unlike Cather, Gaddis did not destroy any of his letters, but in one note in the new collection he does wonder if, after writing a letter, he should mail a copy rather than the original so that contents of the letter would remain under his copyright and could not be shared without his permission.
Gaddis did not fear that the publication of his correspondence would betray messy secrets. For him, the problem with reading an author’s letters is the way that it encourages us, as he says, to put “the man in the place of his work.” The more we see of one, he knew, the cloudier our picture becomes of the other. Many novelists dream that they’ll be, as Faulkner says, “voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save for the printed books.” Born in 1922, Gaddis wrote five novels (most notably, “The Recognitions” and “JR”), sprawling and dense fictions that earned him the title of Mr. Difficult. The comedy and inventiveness of those books—“JR,” written almost entirely in dialogue, features the liveliest demotic by any American novelist other than Twain—is rarely on display in the correspondence. Gaddis mainly kept up with scholars and dissertation scribes; he was constantly called on to clarify his intentions, point out the importance of neglected passages, elucidate hidden structures. “I can’t see a writer,” he says, “following his books around trying to say what he did mean, if the book failed to convey it.” But Gaddis was goaded into the very game he hoped to avoid, and much of his correspondence, accordingly, is workmanlike, full of clerical trifles and back-and-forths, the correcting of errata, and so on.
Still, many scholars and readers will be eager to make trifles into something more. Henry James missed his older brother’s wedding in the summer of 1878, and sent William a letter of apology that reads, in part, “As I was divorced from you by an untimely fate on this occasion, let me at least repair the injury given you, in the most earnest words that my clumsy pen can shape, a tender bridal benediction.” James seems to be making a comment about how, on the most celebratory occasions, one cannot help clumsily using trite expressions like “tender bridal benediction.” These lines seem fairly humdrum, and we might imagine any number of authors writing the same. But Leon Edel, James’s biographer, believes them to be loaded with significance:
Readers can debate whether James’s use of the verb divorce is truly curious in such a setting, or if “clumsy pen” has phallic connotations. The effect of Edel’s analysis, either way, is to turn criticism into sleuthing, for when James’s feelings are said to be so clearly reflected in “Confidence,” the central question—does this book succeed as a work of art?—is no longer central. Had the particulars of James’s life been voided from history, “Confidence,” a novel he later barred from a collected edition of his works, would come off as clunky apprentice material, not much more than juvenilia. But thanks to that letter, Edel is able to cast the book as illustrative, essential to our understanding of James.
Connections between the correspondence and the work almost always run one way: the letters serve to decode the text. Seldom is it said that in an author’s letters we also see the work reading the life. Writers are constantly quoting themselves, citing their own novels and poems when answering their mail, and not just out of vanity. Gaddis, in one letter, describes to his daughter why he and his wife have separated by pointing to his second book: “It’s got to do,” he says, “with what sociologist David Reisman labeled as ‘inner directed’ vs. ‘outer directed’ people, and very much what JR is all about.” He sketches the main conflict of the novel, offering a thumbnail summary as an explanation of the marital divide. Reading the note, you realize how much Gaddis was transformed by the writing of “JR,” a labor that lasted two decades. The book is like a second set of eyes, framing the view he holds of himself and those around him.
Here, you might say, “No, that is a trifle you are reading too much into.” My assertion, like Edel’s, is fundamentally untestable; if I’m wrong, who’s to say? Playing detective games can be fun, but what we really want—full intimacy or knowingness—eludes us. In even the best letters, there is normally a moment when the author wings away. Virginia Woolf’s correspondence, like that of Henry James, is mined for clues about her sexuality. To Jacques Raverat, a painter, Woolf once bemoaned the way men spoke to her at parties:
This is a thrilling passage, not only because of the brilliance of the second sentence but because the first allows you to track Woolf’s mind as she brings herself to the cusp of revelation, stops, and backs away. The words “or at any rate” suggest that we should read what follows as qualification, or as retreat, if you take the beginning of the excerpt to be frank disclosure. But then she comes round again, approaching the subject expansively, metaphorically, and you have to ask, could such an everyday complaint about men really be the source, the motor, of that image of swimming into the dusk? She has to be talking about something more than simply whom she’d rather to enter into conversation with, right?
I think of that sentence in bars, at football games, whenever the dreary insistence of men begins to show itself. Woolf’s letter achieves a little universality of its own, outstripping the identity of its creator. Besides, even if we could use the text to discover whether Woolf really did prefer women as sexual partners, it wouldn’t explain how she wrote a phrase as fine and poetic as “swim at once into the silent dusk.” If we substitute the author for the work, as Gaddis says, it is not always for ignoble reasons. We want to see how the thing gets made, and letters, with their literal testimony, promise to offer some help. Usually, though, the more we speculate the more we are led back to the common. Spasms of jealousy, violent fantasies, hidden dimensions: we all have those, so chances are slim that any one is the prized element, the essential quality.
