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ОглавлениеChapter Five
How to Write the Perfect Letter, Part 1
There is a new pope. Hooray for his holiness. But how, in 1216, should you write to him about the management of your church? Or about a terrible miscarriage of justice? How best to address your student son about the dangers of excessive study? Or give warning regarding the unhappy events that befall students at the outset of their courses?
All these problems may be solved with the purchase of the Boncompagnonus (also available as the Boncompagnus) a six-volume manual featuring all of the real-life examples above. There are others: how to write a grant application and a letter of recommendation, how to persuade people to go on pilgrimage and how to compose a letter to settle a matrimonial dispute. You could also learn how to write to jugglers about their fees. The guide was composed in 1215 by Boncompagno of Signa. A Bolognese professor of rhetoric and a master at chess, he had a reputation as a megalomaniac* and a bit of a prankster, but his letter guide is all business, particularly when it comes to money and the law, and how to write a letter of condolence following bereavement. The condolence templates, which formed the 25th section of the first book, were so diverse as to allow no room for error. There was consideration of the particular practices of the mourning habits of the Hungarians, the Sicilians, the Slavs, the Bohemians and the Germans, and the different ways to interpret the ‘bliss of priests and clerics’ and the customs of ‘certain provincials’.
What was Boncompagno’s motivation for writing such a guide? He hoped that the well-written letter might go some way to correcting society’s ills, with the prime targets being injustice and jealousy. These ills, he believed, would plant the teeth of the hydra upon you, a beast that ‘never rests, but surveys the world, tracking down any sort of good fortune, and always it tries to find any sort of excellence, which when it cannot harm, it is confused, grumbles, shrieks, rages, becomes delirious, swallows up, harasses, becomes livid, becomes pale, clamours, becomes nauseated, hides, barks, bites, raves, foams at the mouth, rages, seethes, snarls’ and that kind of thing. But motivation and effect are different things.
The medieval epistolary expert Alain Boureau has observed that Boncompagno’s manual was one of our earliest proofs of the complex and changing hierarchy of European society, with a classification that relied on a wide variety of positions and ranks rather than just divisions in the Church and nobility. Letter guides such as this bear witness to the emergence of a middle class, and the influence of the universities. They gave voice to a new grouping of people in villages and towns that had previously not been incorporated into either feudal or ecclesiastical worlds, many of them in the burgeoning legal professions. Soon merchants would demand letter-writing guidance of their own.
Aristotle, who believed one should write as one speaks.
But the Boncompagnonus was not the first guide to the art of letter-writing. For that we should credit a man called Demetrius, date uncertain, background unknown. This Latin tract has been dated somewhere between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD, and the Demetrius at the helm may be Demetrius of Phaleron or Demetrius of Tarsus, although most bamboozled scholars have found it easier to consider the author as anonymous.
What is clear is the certitude of the advice. The author’s brief is far less specific than many of the manuals that followed it, but its generality should be useful to all. He begins by questioning the advice once given by Artemon, the editor of Aristotle’s letters, that ‘a letter should be written in the same manner as a dialogue’, a letter being one of two sides of a conversation.* ‘There is perhaps some truth in what he says, but not the whole truth,’ Demetrius contends. ‘The letter should be a little more formal than the dialogue, since the latter imitates improvised conversation, while the former is written and sent as a kind of gift.’
He remarks that the sort of sudden sentence breaks that are so common in dialogue do not translate well to letter-writing: ‘abruptness in writing causes obscurity’. Letters can do some things much better than speech. ‘The letter should be strong in characterization,’ Demetrius observes. ‘Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.’
With regards to length, a letter should be ‘restricted’. ‘Those that are too long, not to mention too inflated in style, are not in any true sense letters at all but treatises with the heading “Dear Sir”.’ It is also ‘absurd to be so formal in letters, it is even contrary to friendship, which demands the proverbial calling of “a spade a spade”.’ And there were some topics for which a letter was just plain unsuitable, not least ‘the problems of logic or natural philosophy’. Rather, ‘A letter’s aim is to express friendship briefly and set out a simple subject in simple terms . . . The man who utters sententious maxims and exhortations seems to be no longer chatting in a letter but preaching from the pulpit.’ Demetrius allowed for one or two exceptions to this, such as letters addressed to ‘cities or kings’, which permitted a little more elaboration. ‘In summary, the letter should combine two of the styles, the elegant or graceful and the plain, and this concludes my account of the letter.’
By the thirteenth century, when Boncompagno crafted his advice, the range of letter templates available had expanded greatly, and their abundance fulfilled a need: letter-writing was not an intuitive skill. The craft of letter-writing was only beginning to be taught in European schools, and although Cicero and Seneca would shortly be back in vogue, their antiquity was not always suited to contemporary challenges. So there were two choices: the professional paid scribe who set up a stall in the market as if he was selling root crops, or the ars dictaminis, the self-help manual. The ars dictaminis would soon have a sibling, the ars notariae, which specialised in writing advice for legal and patent matters, but its main purpose was to provide a guide to writing ‘familiar’ or more personal and general letters, albeit ones that still bowed firmly to rhetorical tradition (and were usually designed to be read out loud to whoever was gathered when they arrived).
Italy and France led the way, with England following their trail, and there were soon so many that it was hard to distinguish between them, the faddy self-help books of their day. The earliest available inspiration came from a guide by the Benedictine monk, Alberic of Monte Cassino, published around 1075, while a short and anonymous manual published 60 years later in Bologna was one of the earliest to give detailed instruction on the correct forms of opening address, the salutatio that was to remain a standard entry in general etiquette guides, cleverly combining the benevolentiae captatio, the securing of goodwill by flattery (the best technique was to induce a sense of fatherly or brotherly feeling, or failing that a sense of ‘fellowship’). A pupil may get his way with his master if he sticks to something like ‘To [master’s name here] By divine grace resplendent in Ciceronian charm, [your name here], inferior to his devoted learning, expresses the servitude of a sincere heart.’ The next three categories of advice were not too far removed from something we might expect today: the naratio (the latest news), the petitio (the real reason for writing) and the conclusio.
One of the first such textbooks in English was compiled by an Italian, Giovanni di Bologna, specifically for use by the Archbishop of Canterbury, while Lawrence of Aquilegia wrote some of the first recognisable examples of the ‘form letter’, whereby a user fills in the blanks on a template by picking the relevant words from a list. The choice of recipients alone provides quite a range, from kings and archdeacons to heretics and ‘falsos infidelos’, the latter perhaps more deserving of a pub brawl than flawless correspondence.
Soon the university cities of Bologna and Orleans were offering so many different professional guides that their authors, the master épistoliers, were called dictatori, a term which underlined their overbearing political influence. Many were members of the clergy, some also held teaching posts at universities. Their names were famous in their day: Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Arnulf of Orleans, Peter of Blois, Ludolf of Hildescheim and Conrad of Zurich.
As with the more refined reaches of academia, many dictatori seemed to be writing for the sole benefit and approval of fellow dictatori; many of their letter templates describe the masterful art of letter-writing, a hall of mirrors. A prime example is supplied by Hugh of Bologna in his Rationes Dictandi from the twelfth century. After a slow and suitably grovelling start (‘To X, a very great scholar in the science of letters, a very eloquent man’ etc), the letter considers its navel: ‘The grace of God was not content, oh master and most revered lord, to make you a peerless scholar in the liberal arts; it has also provided you with a great gift in epistolary art. This is what is reported by an insistent rumour that fills the greater part of the world; this rumour could not persist were it not true.’
Portrayed thus, master letter-writers of late medieval Europe bestrode society as an enviable combination of healer of the sick and rock god.
Indeed, through the operation of an incomparable grace, you have known how to teach to your disciples that which God has given to you to know, much more quickly than other masters. That is why so very many disciples forsake the other masters and hasten from all sides towards you, as fast as they are able. Under your instruction, the uneducated are immediately cultivated, the stutterers are immediately eloquent, the dull-witted are immediately enlightened, the twisted are immediately made straight.*
The letter-writing manual changed significantly during the Renaissance as humanism embraced Petrarch’s influence and, by default, Cicero’s. By the beginning of the sixteenth century we had certainly arrived at the modern sort of guidebook we would have still acknowledged as useful 20 years ago, the methodus conscribendi epistolis. The latest champion of the art was Desiderius Erasmus, the masterful Dutch humanist and perhaps the foremost scholar of his day; he not only ushered in the Protestant Reformation, but also found time to write thousands of tracts and letters on non-theological themes. His tracts confronted head on the Seneca-toned concerns of how best one should live one’s life (and not waste it: one of his most famous treatises was about folly). And his letters, of which about 1,600 have survived (he claimed to have spent about half of his life writing them) range from his rational defence of his stance against new Catholic doctrines, through his translations of classical literature, to far more personal matters such as the disappointing vintage of the local wines to his poor finances and health (he had debilitating arthritis, and in later years had to pass on writing duties to an assistant). And of course several of the letters contained the one recurring topic we’ve seen before and may see again: Erasmus chiding his friends and family for not writing sooner and more often.
Writing in about 1487 from a monastery near Gouda to his older brother Pieter, a monk based near Delft, Erasmus pushed the guilt button from the start:
Have you so completely rid yourself of all brotherly feeling, or has all thought of your Erasmus wholly fled your heart? I write letters and send them repeatedly, I demand news again and again, I keep asking your friends when they come from your direction, but they never have a hint of a letter or any message: they merely say that you are well. Of course this is the most welcome news I could hear, but you are no more dutiful thereby. As I perceive how obstinate you are, I believe it would be easier to get blood from a stone than coax a letter out of you!
Erasmus’s letters were strewn all over Europe: he wrote to correspondents in London, Cambridge, Dover, Amsterdam, Cologne, Strasbourg, Bologna, Turin, Brussels and Lubeck. He believed there was ‘almost no kind of theme which a letter may not treat’, but he was largely a traditionalist, believing it preferable to have a studied letter than a spontaneous one: ‘rather . . . a letter should smell of the lamp than of liquor, of the ointment box, and of the goat’. Above all he liked the idea of the letter, the material artefact, the letter as the great discursive template for the modern world. If you write a letter well (which you could do if you took his strict advice), then you would surely declare yourself a man of that world.
Half his life writing letters: Erasmus in furs by Holbein.
His letter-writing guide, compiled while he was a teacher in Paris in the early 1500s, covered some familiar ground (the clarity and aptness of expression), and he wrote particularly well about how the writer should above all be versatile: a letter should be ‘as closely suited as possible to the argument, place, time, addressee; which when dealing with weighty matters is serious, which with mediocre matters is neat; with humble matters elegant and witty; which is ardent and spirited in exhortation, soothing and friendly in consolation.’
But perhaps the most noteworthy element of both the manual and the collections of his own letters that Erasmus supervised towards the end of his life was that they were formulated not for the scribe but for the printing press, initially in Cambridge in 1521, and then widely disseminated through several other printing houses in Italy and Germany. However ironic it seemed, the art of letter-writing had found its greatest ally in moveable type. Far from inhibiting the art, machines only amplified its significance to history and ideas.
Letters could now be collected and bound; printing ensured archiving, and a greater shot at survival; the unique letter cache, the rare fair manuscript copies – these would still be posterity’s wonderful and invaluable things. But now, for the great public thinkers whose collected letters were regarded as both history and currency, their discovery and safe-keeping may not be so necessary; libraries would take care of that from here on. The printing press brought with it the collected letters and the man of letters (and, within two centuries, women of letters too). Erasmus claimed that his letters were not history but literature, and now both arts would have their day, and it would be a lasting one.
Two English publishers produced manuals that swiftly became vernacular classics, and to turn the pages of the first of these at the Bodleian Library in Oxford is to experience an early tang of Machiavellian intrigue notably absent from previous guides. The new letter specimens continued to be predominantly concerned with respect – the correct form, the ever-humble approach – but now there were new considerations: technique, mild manipulation, clever compromise, advice on the use of letters to get one’s way. Cicero had employed letters to his political ends, and now there was guidance on how we could all do it.
William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) was the first bestselling guide published in English, enjoying ten editions in the next 50 years.* One reads it with a clear sense of the growing importance of letters in Elizabethan society, not least their use in bonding a society; largely through trade and other economic necessities, families were beginning to disperse. Fulwood’s work was translated from a successful French guide, but the author was careful to adapt as much of the local colour and situations as possible to his English readers, although he kept most of the addresses in his examples as either Lyons or Paris. Fulwood’s main appeal lies in his acknowledgement that most letters are replies to others, and the fact that the hypothetical situations he presents are not only practical but highly engaging. In one, he ponders the scenario of a merchant father suspecting his son of selling their silk goods at far below their market value. In the first letter, the father writeth unto the sonne.**
Verily my sonne, though wilt be the occasion through thy evill behavior, to haste me sooner than I thought unto my grave: for one of these dayes in this Towne of Lyons many gentlemen and marchants confirmed unto me that all the clothes of scarlet which thou didst cary with thee are lost. Also I am advertised by my trusty frends, that sundry dames in Lyons go sumptuously arayed with our clothes of Silke, and thou of them hast none other payment, but that thou takest accompt secretly in ye night.
This is not the fayth which thou didst promise me at thy departure: therefore thy mother continually weepeth, and thy two virtuous and honest Sisters lament without ceassing. But tell me, with what knyves thinckest thou that thou doest wounde the most secrete partes of our heartes: therefore be redy to amend thy errour, or else veryly cease to call me Father, and holde thy selfe assured (except thou amend) that neither of my goods nor money thou shalt ever have any parte hereafter.
Thy Carefuull Father
The Sonne Maketh Answere Unto His Father
My dearly beloved Father, I have ben advertised by your sorowful letter of evill adventure of our merchandise: but bicause you are my Father & a prudent Father, it is lawfull for you without occasion, to reprehende and threaten me: howbeit he that who committeth not the fault, is always accompanied with sweete hope. Those that have tolde you that I give your clothes of Silke unto the dames of Lyons, peradventure have taken it in evill part, that I have not given some peece of silk unto their wives, & would peradventure have taken no care to have asked them from when ye garments have come, so that they spare theyr pens.
I praye you therefore my deare father, be content & glad: for I consume not your goods, but I sell them aswel unto women as unto men. I send you by our Factour two thousand pounds for clothes of scarlet, & six hundreth poundes for clothes of silke: I will tary to finish the rest, & the cursed envie languishing shall fall unto the ground: and you shal finde me (God to frend) a good, just & faithfull Sonne &c.
The other highly successful manual (nine editions in 50 years) was Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). This contained more original material than Fulwood, not least when it came to guidance over love letters. And the specimens were convincing creations, often involving the resolution of conflicts between lovers or fathers and sons, a basis perhaps for the earliest epistolary novels. In English Elizabethan schools the most popular Latin manual, taught consistently alongside letters from Cicero and Erasmus, was Georgius Macropedius’s Methodus de Conscribendis Epistolis. The theory holds that it was this guide, more than any other, that influenced the style of letters in the works of Shakespeare.
But not everyone subscribed to the wisdom of these guides. Writing in the 1570s, the progressive French essayist Montaigne claimed he was ‘a sworn enemy to all manner of falsification,’ (by which he meant inauthenticity), and in an essay entitled ‘A Consideration upon Cicero’ he took sceptical issue with Erasmus when it came to the formality of a letter. Montaigne rejected studiousness in favour of expressive spontaneity, and he believed his own style suited only ‘familiar’ letters rather than business ones. He thought his language ‘too compact, irregular, abrupt, and singular’ to suit formal composition, and he mistrusted letters that ‘have no other substance than a fine contexture of courteous words’. He said that he always wrote personally rather than employ a scribe, even though his handwriting was ‘intolerably ill’. And the less he thought about things in advance, the better the letter.
I have accustomed the great ones who know me to endure my blots and dashes, and upon paper without fold or margin. Those that cost me the most pains, are the worst; when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders, ’tis a sign that I am not there. I fall too without premeditation or design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end.
And there was another thing Montaigne didn’t like about the manuals with their ideal specimens: the beginnings and the endings. ‘The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces than in matter,’ he argued. He said he had deliberately avoided writing to ‘men of the long robe and finance’ for fear of making mistakes in addressing them. And for the closing niceties, ‘I would with all my heart transfer it to another hand to add those long harangues, offers, and prayers that we place at the bottom, and should be glad that some new custom would discharge us of that trouble’.
Montaigne’s views would have received solid support from the satirists of the day. Almost as soon as it was born, the letter-writing manual was down on its knees begging for parody, and the only surprise was that it took until 1602 for the first hit to appear, A Poste with a Packet of Madde Letters by Nicholas Breton. Breton was an English pamphleteer and publishing opportunist, author of what we would today call toilet books. And he was very good at them. His Madde Letters was written with the intention ‘to pleasure many’, and he achieved this aim through many editions, an acknowledgment that his readers clearly regarded his targets as fair game. Because his letters were fiction, his work could also claim to be the first epistolary novel.
He took aim against the begging letter, the letter dissuading a friend from marriage, and what is probably the earliest example of the Dear John letter. In this, a naive country bumpkin-type won’t quite admit defeat:
The cause of my writing to you at this time is, that Ellen, I do hear since coming from Wakefield, when you knowe, that talk we had together at the sign of the blue cuckoe, and how you did give mee you hand, and swear that you would not forsake me for all the worlde, and how you made me buy a Ring and a Hart, that cost me eighteen pence, which I left with you, and you gave me a Napkin to weare in my Hat, I thanke you, which I will weare til my dying daye: and I mervaile if it be true as I heare, that you have altered your minde, and are made sure to me neighbour Hoblins younger sonne, truly Ellen you do not wel in so doing, and God will plague you for it, and I hope I shall live and if I never have you: for there are more maides than Maulkin, and I count myself worth the whistling.*
Breton inspired further parodies. Conceyted Letters, Newley Layde Open was followed by Hobson’s Horse-Loade of Letters, A Speedie Poste and then A President for Young Pen-Men, or the Letter-Writer, the latter thought to be the first to include ‘letter-writer’ in a title. One of the best was the anonymous Cupids Messenger of 1629, and as its title suggested it was concerned primarily with love letters. But it is love in all its disarray, a comedy of cruelty, such as this cri de coeur from a man in prison to his former intended. He feels she was more than happy to take his money when he lavished it on her, but is less loving now that it’s gone, and the bile spits up a recipe for revenge that appears to draw directly from the cauldron of Macbeth’s Three Witches.
If my paper were made of the skins of croking Toades, or speckled Adders, my inke of the blood of Scorpions, my penne pluckt from the Screech-owles wings, they were but fit instruments to write unto thee, thou art more venomous, more poisonous, more ominous than the worst of these: for do but descend into the depth of thy guilty conscience, and see how manie vows, promises, and deepe protestations, nay millions of oaths hast thou sworne thy fidelitie unto mee, which one day will witnesse against thee.
The end of the page would surely bring a little respite, perhaps even a redemptive finale. Or not:
Leprosie compared to thee is all health, and all manner of infection but a flea-biting, and all manner of diseases, though they were fetcht from twentie Hospitals, were but like the fit of an ague: for thou art all Leprosie, all diseases for neither thy bodie nor thy soule are free from the disease of shame and disgrace of the world . . . God amend and pardon thee.
Once thy friend,
I.P.
The serious art of epistolary courtship received a boost in the seventeenth century from – where else? – France and the French. Le Secretaire à la Mode by Jean Puget de la Serre billed itself as a ‘refined way of expression in all manners of letters’, and indeed set a standard for the century to come. By 1640, when the book was translated into English by John Massinger, letters had attained both an elevated and popular status they hadn’t enjoyed since the days of Pliny the Younger: a status of widely practised and wholly indispensible daily traffic in words. The letter had moved from something written solely by the Church and the state, the fearsome and powerful, to the realm of middle-class art. And despite much scattered evidence that letter-writers chose to ignore the wisdom proffered in these guides, the how-to genre was clearly here to stay: in 1789, an inventory of a printer and bookseller in Troyes, north-central France, revealed 1,848 copies of a late edition of Le Secretaire à la Mode, and some 4,000 copies of similar manuals. The more the world wrote, the more it required guidance.
Once you knew what to write, how should you display your new knowledge on paper? How should a letter be laid out?
That largely depended on how wealthy you were, or what status you held. The specimen guides were rather strict in their presentations, suggesting that anyone should be able to glance at a letter and, without reading a word, be able to tell if it was addressed to a recipient inferior or a superior to the sender. In the opinion of Fulwood’s Enemie of Idlenesse, the opening of a letter should be designed ‘according to the estate of the writer, and the qualitie of the person to whom wee write’. ‘For to our superiors wee must write at the right side in the neither end of the paper, saying: By your most humble and obedient sonne, or servant . . . And to our equals we must write towards the middest of the paper, saying: By your faithful friend for ever . . . To our inferiours wee may write on high at the left hand.’
Angel Day’s and de la Serre’s manuals also emphasised the minutiae – precisely how big a gap to leave between the name of the addressee and the main body of the text, and also how much to indent the first paragraph, the white space again depending on the level of submission and deference one intended to convey, referred to as ‘the honorary margin’. The historian James Daybell suggests that there is evidence from thousands of letters that what he calls ‘the social politics of manuscript space’ was widely adhered to. When John Donne wrote with great humility to his estranged father-in-law, he signed his name at the extreme bottom right-hand corner of the letter, thus stressing his insignificance, a tiny reverential afterthought. This practice was particularly visible in the letters sent by subjects to monarchs. Women writing to men in the seventeenth century almost always signed their name in the uttermost bottom right-hand corner, another miserable sign of flattened social standing.
And the opposite was also apparent. When the second earl of Essex dashed off a note to his cousin Edward Seymour in 1598, he consciously chose the top of the letter to sign his name. The short six-line instruction left a huge amount of blank space beneath it on a large uncut sheet. It wasn’t a design statement, it was a statement of wealth; paper was costly, and the message surely was, ‘I’ve got reams of the stuff.’
Paper size in early modern England was something we might regard as fairly standard for official correspondence today, if a little squarer. A ‘folio’ sheet was commonly either 30 by 35cm or 42 by 45cm, depending on the local mill. The sheet would then usually be folded in half, and the writing would cover one or two sides. The other two blank sides would be used to conceal the contents by folding and tucking, with one of them being used for the address and the other for the seal.
Smaller Elizabethan letters often betrayed poverty, but in the middle of the seventeenth century the letter size shrunk from the folio size to the ‘folded half-sheet quarto’, significantly smaller and more rectangular at about 20 by 30cm. The smaller sheets left less blank space, but sometimes no blank space at all was desirable: it was common for writers to crosshatch around their words to ensure that no one tried to add any further sentiments to the ones they had originally composed.
But what happened then? You could write to almost anyone about almost anything, and you could lay it out according to the respectful customs of the day. But how on earth – before letterboxes, stamps and a regular delivery network – would a letter reach its intended recipient? And why did we ever assume that a personal letter containing important information would ever remain private as it battled gamely towards its destination?
Trying to Impress
21st and 27th February 1944
Dear Bessie,
I received your letter of 1st January on 7.2.44, since when I have been busting to send you a ‘smashing’ reply, yet feeling clumsy as a ballerina in Army boots, who knows that her faithful followers will applaud, however she pirouettes. I could hug you till you dropped! The un-ashamed flattery that you ladled out was very acceptable – I lapped it up gladly and can do with more! Yes, I could hug you – an action unconnected with the acute shortage of women in these parts, and mostly symbolic of my pleasure at your appreciation of qualities so very few others see, and which really I do not possess. I must confess that your outrageous enthusiasm banishes ‘acquaintance’ from my mind, and that I recognise the coming of a new-kind-of-atmosphere into our interchanges, and one which you will need to watch.
To be honest, rather than discreet: Letters from home sometimes contain curious statements. ‘Paddling’ one of my own, I had told them of my first letter from you. Back came a weather forecast: ‘Perhaps she will catch you on the rebound.’ I, of course, have no such wish, yet I certainly haven’t told anyone of your latest letter, and was glad I was able to conceal it from my brother. I find myself engaged on the secretive, denying dodge that has marked the opening stages of all my little affairés since the first Girl Probationer crossed my path. I can see that willy-nilly I am having a quiet philander, and I want to warn you it’ll end in a noisy flounder unless you watch out. I haven’t a ’aporth of ‘rebound’ in me. I warm to you as a friend and I hope that remains our mutual rendezvous, although I feel that the more I write you, the less content you will be.
I hope you will not think I regarded your letter as purely a back-pat for me. As I read yours I wha-rooped too. You’ll find this effort somewhat ‘forced’. I believe it is true that when you want to be natural, you aren’t. If you understand me, you have made me a bit ‘conscious’. I’m blowed if I am not trying to impress you. You say your mind is a rambling rubbish box, and your youthful desires for improvement remain unfulfilled. I don’t remember having many youthful desires (except that I do recall Madeline Carroll featuring in one of them). I am glad you accept my view on others not being informed of the contents of our letters. It will be much more satisfactory, we shall know each other much better through an ‘in confidence’ understanding.
I do not share your views about the ‘waste of time’ involved in a crashed courtship.
You say it is odd that I can be so ignorant about women, but apart from the important omission of never having slept with one, I regard myself as capable of detecting a wile when I see one, and I do not think women are so very different from men in any important aspect. If I were really plonking down what I did know, I should have to admit that I am puzzled very often by the behaviour of many of my own sex, and not a little quizzical about my own at times.
I am sorry you felt the least bit ‘weepy’ at my chess, garden, pigs. The things your tears are best reserved for are beetles this size [small sketch], and fleas whose size is much less horribly impressive, but whose powers of annoyance are far greater. I exult in the possession of a sleeping sheet, which is very nice to have next to the skin compared with the rough Army blankets. At night, if the fleas are active and I cannot subdue them with my fevered curses, I take my sheet and my naked body into the open, and turn and shake the sheet in the very cold night air. Then I get back into bed and hold the ends of the sheet tight around my neck, to keep out my nuisance raiders. The last few months have been very pleasant as regards heat, and fleas have been few. I am not looking forward to the summer.
So on to our pigs – yesterday came the day for the male (boar) to be sent away for slaughter. Half a dozen of us were detailed to hold various parts of the massive, dirty, unfortunate creature, while the man who knows all about pigs got a bucket firmly wedged over the poor thing’s head and snout. I was originally deputed to take hold of the right ear, but in the opening melee found myself grasping the right leg, which I held on to firmly as it lumbered out of the sty, and heaved on heavily as, somehow, despite a terrific struggle and the most heartrending screams, we got it on the lorry, which was to be its hearse. Directly it got up there, it went very quiet and then started snuffling around for something to eat. In the afternoon it met its man-determined fate, and this morning as I came away from dinner, I saw its tongue, its heart, liver and a leg, hanging from the cookhouse roof. I had my doubts about eating it in the days when it was half the eighteen stone it weighed at death. But now I have none. I certainly can’t help eat the poor old bloke. The sow lives on, she has a large and sore looking undercarriage, and will be a Mother in three weeks. I suppose we shall eat her progeny in due course.
Here am I, nominally a soldier, feeling tender hearted about a pig. And there, a couple of weeks ago, were four of our chaps deputed to shoot three of the camp dogs, no more than puppies, laughing, bright, happy, who had somehow got canker of the ear necessitating their destruction. The stomachs of these chaps were really affected, and they were thoroughly miserable.
My eye on post-war arguments when I shall be accused of disloyalty and lack of patriotism because of my desire for changes, I recently made application for ‘The Africa Star’, which most chaps here are wearing. I have first heard that I am to get it.
When you know that I arrived out on April 16th and the hostilities ceased May 12th, you can see how very easily medals are gained. It is the same very often with awards supposedly for gallantry.
My Dad, a thorough going old imperialist, will be delighted that he can talk about two sons with the medal, and mentally they will be dangling with his – eight altogether, though his nearest point to danger was really the Siege of Ladysmith (in a war maybe you would have condemned?). Since the war, my Dad has had medal ribbons fitted on most of his jackets and waistcoats, and goes shopping with them all a’showing! My Mother comes in bemoaning the fact that there is no suet to be had. Dad comes in with a valuable half-a-pound he extracted from a medal-conscious shopkeeper. Once, my Mother was not able to get any soda, and my Dad went out and ordered 56lbs, which actually arrived the same afternoon, to my Mother’s mixed joy and regret! I can tell you plenty about my Dad, who has many faults and the one redeeming virtue that he is all for his family, right or wrong.
I have just seen a Penguin, ‘Living in Cities’, very attractively setting forth some principles of post-war building. I always think how well off we suburban dwellers* are compared with the people who live in places like Roseberry Avenue or Bethnal Green Road, and die there, too, quite happily since they never knew what they missed.
I saw a suggestion for a new house to have a built-in bookcase, or place for it, and thought this a rather good idea, especially as my three or four hundred nondescripts are shoved, wedged, packed tight at the top of a cupboard at the moment. I carry with me now only an atlas, a dictionary, Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ (ever glanced at it – a philosophy), selected passages from R.L. Stevenson, and ‘The Shropshire Lad’, by Housman.
We all try to carry on as though we were at home, and where we act differently we are doing things we would have liked to have done at home, if the chance had arisen. The Army turns very few saints into devils, though it may be easier than the reverse process. A Sergeant Major is usually a curt, barking, more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow, kind of chap. Yet the one we have here couldn’t treat us better if he was our Father. He does more fatigues than anyone else in the Camp, asks you to do things, never orders. When he came here three months ago, we had one dirty old tent to eat our meals in, and that was all. Since then, we have added several more tents; plenty of forms and tables; a rest tent with a concrete floor; dozens of games, a regular weekly whist drive, a small library. Once we could only bathe in our tent, petrol tin fashion. Now, we use the showers in town, doing some forty miles in the process. If this is the Army – well, it’s not bad.
We get a Film Show every Saturday; whatever the weather, it is held in the open air, the audience (stalls) sitting on petrol tins, while those in the gallery sit on top of the vehicles, many of which come several miles for what is usually the only event of the week. I have sat in the pouring rain with a ground-sheet over me. I have sat with a gale bowling me over literally while Barbara Stanwyck (in ‘The Great Man’s Lady’ – she was a brunette) bowled me over figuratively. Only occasionally does a weakling leave the huddled concourse. We take our fun seriously, and when we can get it, though I always think of the Open Air Theatre at Regent’s Park, seeing ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ on a brilliantly lit sward, with a pre-war searchlight dancing in the sky above us.
George Formby has done a lot of talking since his trip here, but not a word (publicly) about losing ten bottles of beer from the back of his charabanc. Some chaps I was with at the time did the pinching and subsequent drinking, so I know!
Best wishes, Friend (The Lord Forgive Me),
Chris
* He wrote, for example, of how he ruled ‘the field of eloquence with exalted genius and a solemn style’.
* The letters of Aristotle that Demetrius refers to have not survived. The advice that one should ‘write as one speaks’ has become a classic doctrine, and was favoured by Jane Austen amongst innumerable others. We’ll return to it in later chapters.
* As quoted in Alain Boureau, “The Letter-Writing Norm, a Medieval Invention’ in Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century by Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cecile Dauphin, translated by Christopher Woodall, Polity Press, 1997.
* The title may have derived from The Image of Idleness (1555), a fictional account of letters between a bachelor and a married man written by ‘Olyver Oldwanton and dedicated to the Lady Lust’.
** The old English grammar and spelling are retained here for flavour, although the ‘v’ has been replaced with our now-familiar ‘u’, and the letter ‘j’ has been substituted for ‘i’ when the occasion merits it. As quoted in The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Jean Robertson, University Press of Liverpool, 1942.
* A maulkin was a harlot.
* Chris Barker lived in Tottenham; Bessie Moore in Blackheath.
