Signs & signatures
The romance of 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 back brought him that...."

— Henry James

IN these times of tearing hurry and speed when one has no knowledge of even one’s neighbours, no concern for life’s endless charms which lie at one’s own door, to think of leisurely pursuits such as letter-writing is to evoke nostalgic memories of the days when one waited for the click of the mail-box to retrieve letters, and peruse them page by page in a slow, measured manner. Yes, letter-writing today has become a luxury, if not a dream and letters are considered a nuisance, an anachronism, an invasion on your precious time.

But if a letter redolent of yester- years and old-world charm does turn up once in a blue moon, you cannot but marvel over the "windfall", wonder and wonder and wonder.... For, truly, wonder or enchantment is the essence of romance. And if the writer has that easy, playful hand of which Henry James speaks in the epitaph above, the letter, then, acquires a poetic flavour. It becomes, in the words of James, a rival of both poetry and drama. That kind of letter finds its proper place in the comity of letters, and is saluted with respect.

It was James’ nephew, Harry James, son of the famous American psychologist, William James, who realising the importance of Henry James’s surviving letters, commented thus: "For it’s full of literature as well as character. In fact, I suspect that these letters will become in the history of English literature, not only one of the half dozen greatest epistolary classics, but a sort of milestone."

I have gone through thousands of James’s letters, line by line to glean the insights into the art of letter-writing. And this essay, chiefly, carries a few of the Jamesian views in relation to the high business of embalming sentiments in one’s long pondered letters.

If you read some of the greatest letter-writers in the English language on both sides of the Atlantic, you would find yourself in the company of great statesman, great soldiers, great philosophers, not to speak of great creative writers, poets, novelists, playwright, essayists etc. One of the earliest volumes, Letters to His Son (1774) written by Lord Chesterfield, an elder British statesman, is often cited as a minor classic of its own kind. Other celebrated letter writers include, apart from the poet John Keats, such men of letters as Thomas Carlyle, and novelists Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells. The letters of John Keats written to friends and members of his family have a very special value for Keats’ critics today. Most of his later poems, the great odes, Hyperion, and sonnets would not yield their full Shakespearian flavour if Keats’s theory of poetry, stretched out in detail in his letters had remained unknown, unpublished.

Why, for instance, Victorian letter-writers were so eloquent, so elegant and so wide-ranging could only be understood in terms of the requirement of their imagination. And the subjects ranged from kings and queens, form dynasties and empires, to cabbages and kitchens. There was a prodigality of thought and word, an over-arching view of man, society and civilisations.

Again, one’s most intimate and dearest sentiments to be found in love-letters to one’s lover or beloved carry, in great hands, a unique lyricism, a secret-language of signs and symbols. Being autobiographical in nature, they bring out the encounters of the personality with the "assaults of reality". That’s why Henry James wrote, "My correspondence is the struggle of my life." Particularly moving are the letters relating to personal tragedies, bereavements and desolation.

To be sure, millions of love-letters written in a state of inebriation, ecstasy and enchantment on the one hand, and those written by deceived, forsaken and jilted lovers in agony, in dismay, in helplessness, on the other, seldom see the light of day. But if you happen to come across some such letters blown into your yard or parlour, you may realise how letters can take you to the heights of mystic delights, or plunge you into the deepest waters of despair.

No, despite the cynics, despite the induction of mobile phones and Internet, this little fellow, the love-letter, will continue to be written so long as man continues to dream and muse, so long as the human heart throbs, and the blood flows in the veins.

HOME