Sunday, May 4, 2003		Books

Signs & signatures
Romance of writing letters
Darshan Singh Maini

"HE was a letter-writer if you liked natural, witty, various, vivid, playing with the idlest, lightest hand, up and down the whole scale. His easy power — his easy power: everything that brought him that."

Today, when the telephone, the mobile and other gadgets of instant communication have made the dear old letter a vanishing species, if not a refuge of the lonely and the isolated, to think of letter-writing as one of the finest forms of literary expressions is to travel back in time to those days of leisurely life when letter-writing was an art. I am sure, even today, there must be scores of persons who keep pouring the poetry of the spirit into these frail vessels. Yes, light as the business of letter-writing may be to the uncritical reader, those who have perused the published volumes of letters written by some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the bygone days couldn’t but have wondered at the astonishing virtuosity and plasticity of the genre in question. That it could carry a freight of dreams and desires, of longings and pinings, of intimacies and intimations on the one hand, of the tidings of wars, revolutions, political storms and what you have, on the other, would come as a surprise to those uninitiated into its aesthetic, but such among you as have partaken of its wines and viands would, undoubtedly, vouch for the ‘little fellow’s hospitality to ideas and events extending from peanuts to God’!

My own interest in letter-writing as a most exciting and engaging activity commenced when I started responding to sweet, lyrical love letters in my college years. The sheer intoxication of those lavender pink, gold-rimmed sheets that carried the deepest urges of two throbbing young hearts had a ‘mystique’ whose mysteries had, then, held me in a "thrall". I remember to have written a small article, "On Receiving Letters" for the Khalsa College magazine, The Darbar, and that nostalgia, if not inebriation, abides even after a passage of some 65 years. Even today, when old and stricken, I receive letters from old friends and colleagues, or from unknown correspondents familiar with my writings. I sit down almost immediately to toss off a few lines, and the whole transaction gives me deep satisfaction. For, letter-writing has remained for me a question of what Matthew Arnold said of poetry, "high seriousness". In later days, when I was again in love and the imagination had ripened into a state of fruitfulness, I wrote some long letters which heavy with unrequited and unappeased passion produced a bittersweet harvest. Akin to poetry, these outpourings of a heart grown grey in grief, had a cathartic effect. I remained restive even then, but a strange type of relief too made my suffering a little lighter. Oh, yes, the letter could, like a complex poem, say a lot more, and also hide a lot more to become a carrier of my characteristic ‘signs and signatures’.

I wrote a 42- page critical article entitled "The Epistolary Art of Henry James" when invited to write for a large volume comprehending the American writer’s astonishing productions in over half a dozen literary genres, an exercise designed to commemorate ‘the master’s’ centenary celebrations in 1993. I remember how, up in a New York University apartment, I typed out with my two index fingers the story of James’s letters, one of "the greatest glories" in literature, to recall the words of his most celebrated critic and biographer, Leon Edel. And in that process, I discovered not only some of the tenderest moments in his life, but also how the aesthetic of letter-writing was evolved by him as a supreme mark of the artist in labour. Not only that, his costumed self, draped in layers of thought, brought to me an additional insight into the mysteries of his craft as a writer of some of the greatest novels and stories in the English language. James, the novelist, and James the letter-writer, coalesced to yield rare material for a comprehensive assessment of his corpus.

And thus, in perusing thousands of his letters collected and edited by Leon Idel in four volumes, I discovered the energies that formed the armature of my own thoughts. As said earlier, I had all along regarded letter-writing as a craft which could carry the deepest currents of one’s whirling self. James’s vast epistolarium helped define my own aesthetic of letter-writing, and expand it to the limits possible. I brought back from the Jamesian arbours "a lapful of roses", to use his own felitous phrase from his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady.

Letter-writing, thus, is an art that even the humblest of imaginations have sought to cultivate after their own fashion. A letter is an extension of the self in its most intimate and immediate form. In short, unless it happens to be a purely business or formal affair, it is a song of sorts. It is the closest disposition of personality in word and image. Perhaps even one wandering thought moving wraith-like in a fog of words may redeem a whole blankness. And again, it is the reading between the lines and the subtext of one’s discourse that may eventually create an aesthetic of absence in a very special manner. In a supreme letter-writer like James, to bare those fragments of one’s self is to incur a priest-like obligation, and put the muses at the service of a dream. A letter then, gave the imagination enough room for intellectual gaiety and play. No wonder, James was prepared to grant Thomas Carlyle a seat on Mount Parnassus, overawed by the English writer’s epistolary talent.

Clearly, I have used ‘the master’s’ imperium as a means of rediscovering and refashioning my own craft in this regard. The pupil, thus, accords the sweet and exciting business of letter-writing a 22-gun salute.